Agnes Bernice Martin (1912-2004) was an American-Canadian painter known for her pared down geometric abstractions. Her work has been defined as an “essay in discretion on inward-ness and silence”. Martin is often considered a minimalist and her work was influenced by Taoist and other eastern philosophies.
Like her art, her daily life and dietary habits were marked by restraint and simplicity. After she left the bustle of New York in the mid-1960s, she settled in the New Mexican desert. There, she lived a mostly solitary life, which she believed kept her mind clear and gave her more time and energy to paint. Her diet was not surprisingly simple and repetitive. One winter, she consumed only walnuts, hard cheeses, and preserved tomatoes grown in her garden; another season, she subsisted on a concoction of gelatin, orange juice, and bananas. In times of intense artistic output, her go to snack was bananas and coffee. As Martin entered her eighties, she began to loosen up, allowing herself the occasional martini.
Looking for inspiration for your “Portraits of the Pandemic” exhibition submission? What about some inspiration from art history?
Featured Historic Self Portrait: Gustave Courbet
French painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) was the leader of the Realism movement in 19th-century French painting. Rejecting academic convention and the Romanticism of the previous generation of visual artists, Courbet’s work reflected the unvarnished truth of life as he saw it.
Gustave Courbet, Le Désespéré (1845)
Courbet made numerous self-portraits, both as a method off self-promotion and as a way of finding his artistic style. For an artist who espoused realism many of his self-portraits are decidedly romantic in nature. His self-portrait Le Désespéré (1845) nearly leaps off the canvas. It shows the wild-eyed 24-year old artist staring out at the viewer, his hands tearing at his unkempt hair. Courbet presents himself as the tortured genius struggling for recognition and something to eat.
The self-portrait meant a great deal to Courbet as he took it with him to exile in Switzerland and it remained in his studio until his death.
Misplaced by History: Artists Worth Knowing Gwendolyn (Gwen) Ann Magee
“The art flows through me but does not belong to me alone. It speaks for those who have no voices, whose voices have been ignored, whose voices have been silenced. It relates history and circumstances that must not be forgotten.”
Gwendolyn (Gwen) Ann Magee
Gwendolyn (Gwen) Ann Magee (1943 – 2011) was an African-American fiber artist. Magee learned to quilt in mid-life and quickly became known for her powerful abstract and narrative quilts depicting the African American experience. Her art was informed by her participation in the civil rights movement, careers in social work and business, and her experiences as a wife, mother, and grandmother.
Magee’s childhood in North Carolina was spent surrounded by art publications and visits to museums in New York with her adoptive mother, a schoolteacher. Fascinated with color, Magee recalled trying to dig into paper with crayons to achieve the depths and intensities that could match the brilliant hues in her mind’s eye. The power of color became a signature of her mature work.
Magee enrolled in the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina (UNC) in Greensboro. UNC was in its fourth year of desegregation, and Magee was one of five African Americans in her class. Greensboro was a center of civil rights activities, and Magee became active in local demonstrations against segregation in the community, an experience that would later influence her artistic vision.
Following her graduation in 1963 with a B.A. in sociology, Jones continued graduate study in social science at Kent State and Washington universities. She married D. E. Magee, an ophthalmologist in 1969. The couple moved to Jackson, Mississippi, where they established careers and raised two daughters.
Wanting to make quilts for her daughters to take to college, Magee enrolled in a quilting class in 1989. That class lead to increasing interest in quilting, particularly as it related to other African American quilters. Initially working in traditional quilting methods, she soon moved into abstract designs, and then references to African culture using textile and design traditions. Her vision expanded to include her concern with social justice and African American history and culture.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Magee used her quilts to bring attention to racial injustices of the past and the present. Many of her quilts, including When Hope Unborn Had Died, narrate the impact of slavery in the United States. From 2000 to 2004, Magee worked on a series of twelve quilts inspired by the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing” by James Weldon Johnson. Through her textile art, Magee has also responded to contemporary events. In response to the state of Mississippi voting to keep the Confederate battle cross in their state flag, she created Southern Heritage/Southern Shame in 2001, with layered images of the Confederate flag,
Said Magee, “I see art as a form of communication, a conversation between me, the artist, and the viewer. Each viewer brings different experiences, interacts with the work differently, even if it is two friends standing side by side.” Magee felt her quilts spoke a language that everyone could understand. “My hope is that anyone, no matter what their race or culture, will relate to the work, find something that speaks directly to them. Hopefully, it will continue to speak to people years after I am gone.” She died in Jackson in 2011, age 67, after battling a long-term illness.
Magee’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Mississippi Museum of Art, the Museum of Mississippi History, the Michigan State University Museum, and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and has been exhibited internationally.
Let’s Talk About Art – Toyokuni’s “Geisha and Warrior”
Image Credit: Toyokuni, “Geisha and Warrior”, ca. 1860, Japanese Print, 14 1/2 x 9 3/4 inches, Collection of the Dubuque Museum of Art, N.D.14 (N.D.276). Open Access, Public Domain,
oking for inspiration for your “Portraits of the Pandemic” exhibition submission? What about some inspiration from art history?
Featured Historic Self Portrait:Kathe Kollwitz
Kathe Kollwitz (1867–1945) was a leading twentieth-century German printmaker and sculptor who explored the themes of motherhood, oppression, death, war and sacrifice. Much of her work is autobiographical and self-portraiture was one of her chief forms of expression.
From age 18, when she was an art student in Berlin, until she reached 76, two years before her death at the end of the Second World War, Kollwitz created more than 100 self-portraits. Kollwitz battled depression throughout her life, but it was the tragic death of her son at the onset of World War I that left an indelible mark on her spirit. Her self-portraits capture the depth of raw emotion of an artist who was tormented by great loss, grief and pain.
Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) documented the urban landscape of New York City with her with her wide-format camera in the 1920s and ’30s. Known for her signature bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye points-of-view, Abbott helped shape how others saw the evolving urban landscape. Abbott also redefined gender roles, unapologetically wearing ski pants rather than skirts and living with her life partner, art critic Elizabeth McCausland for decades. Abbott was a lover of cats, both real and in images. She was known to keep in touch with her friends by sending them cat postcards she found in museum gift shops.
Looking for inspiration for your “Portraits of the Pandemic” exhibition submission? What about some inspiration from art history?
Featured Historic Self Portrait: Cindy Sherman
“The still must tease with the promise of a story the viewer of it itches to be told”
For four decades, American photographer Cindy Sherman has used her own body in a variety of roles and persona to explore cultural themes of gender, identity, and celebrity.
Sherman is a member of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists who came of age in the 1970s and responded to the mass media landscape with both humor and criticism, appropriating images from advertising, film, television, and magazines for their art.
Sherman was always interested in experimenting with different identities. As she has explained, “I wish I could treat every day as Halloween and get dressed up and go out into the world as some eccentric character.”
Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) was a French-American artist best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art. Her work explored a variety of themes including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious.
Bourgeois’ approach to cooking was as personal as her art. “I was told as a child in France that cooking is the way to a man’s heart,” she recalled in The Museum of Modern Art Artists’ Cookbook. “Today I know that the notion is absurd.”
Immersed in the New York avant garde art world of the 1960’2 and 70’s, Bourgeois was fond of entertaining her artist friends: “When the galleries close, we all troop over to my house. I have to be prepared to feed as many as fifteen people at a moment’s notice. It is easy for me because of my pressure cookers and my freezer,” she said at the time.
Bourgeois’s contributed to New York City’s Museum of Modern Art cookbook, which featured fellow artists Willem and Elaine de Kooning and Andy Warhol. She favored simple, economical dishes that honored her French heritage. Try this refreshing cucumber salad this summer! From Artsy.net
Louise Bourgeois’s French Cucumber Salad
6 cucumbers, peeled
6 tbsp. olive oil
2 ½ tbsp. tarragon vinegar
½ tsp. tarragon
salt
pepper
chopped chives or green scallions
Layer slivers of cucumber in a small bowl, sprinkling with salt between each layer. Cover the bowl and refrigerate for 12 hours. Remove the cucumbers and wash under cold running water, then dry on towels. To make the dressing, combine oil, vinegar, tarragon, salt, and pepper in a bowl and whisk. Drizzle the mixture over the cucumber slivers and toss. Add chives or scallions, then serve with hot French bread.
Adapted from: The Museum of Modern Art Artists’ Cookbook (MoMA, 1978)
Did you miss last weeks virtual gallery talk with the Flow exhibition artists?
Watch it now on the DuMA YouTube channel~
On May 14th DuMA hosted a virtual gallery talk with artists featured in the exhibition, “Flow: Journey Through The Mississippi River Watershed”. The artist panel included: Anna Metcalfe, Libby Reuter and Susan Knight.
