[caption id="attachment_816" align="aligncenter" width="517" caption="Painting--Nancy Charak, 2010, Primordial Soup 10, 16"x14", watercolor, pencil, prismacolor on birchwood panel."]
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At
Sapere Gallery, 1579 N. Milwaukee, Chicago, IL.
The annual
College Art Association conclave (CAA) has been meeting in Chicago, so as a committed former member I went to a couple of the free panels. On Thursday, February 11, the panel was "Investigating the Need for Women's Art Galleries, Exhibitions, and Organizations: From our Center."
Joyce Owens,
Beate Minkovski,
Amy Galpin and
Joanna Gardner Huggett were on the panel. While the conversation and audience response went somewhat off target (as such are prone to do), there was general agreement that until such time as the high-end market (galleries and museums) is completely responsive to the work of so-called minority artists whose voices have been squelched, then so-called alternative spaces will be necessary.
My own added view is that the member institutions of the CAA graduate so damned many artists out of its BA and MFA programs that there is in essence an over-supply of very, very good, well trained people. The CAA should be teaching artists what the realities of the job markets are.
Then I went to another panel discussion yesterday, Saturday, February 13, titled "Feminist Painting, What Does it Mean to Paint Like a Woman and How Might that Differ from Painting as a Feminist?" That room was jam packed, standing room only. The panelists,
Harmony Hammond,
Carrie Moyer,
Paula Wilson and
Amy Sillman offered up what I can only summarize as "inchoate jargon." At one point the question was asked and answered whether or not this particular panel could have been titled something like being about lesbian or queer art. In addition to the mind numbing jargon there was constant reference to the battles of the 70s, 80s and 90s. My thought is that women have been making art much, much longer and I would have liked a longer historical perspective rather than one tied to the academic squabbles.
A quote was offered up from, I believe,
Arthur Danto, that for a woman to engage in abstract expressionism, which is my oeuvre, is for her to engage in aesthetic cross dressing. I had to do everything in my control to keep from blowing my lunch. I'm not saying that I didn't understand what the panelists were talking about, because I did; what I couldn't deal with was the fixation on the academic squabbles, of the big fight against the male dominated establishment, which clearly still isn't won, as evidenced by the talk in the other panel discussion that I attended, of the continuing need for alternative spaces.
My last plaint is that each of the artists, perhaps logically, talked almost totally about their own work, with some slight references to those women who have gone before. I wanted to stand up and shout out the following names, Helen Frankenthaler, Linda Karshan, Sandra Blow, Katherina Grosse, Joan Mitchell, Pat Steir, and Agnes Martin.
Artist, Judith Roth, "Seated Dancer on Green Chair", 2009, 48"x50", oil on canvas, currently on display at A.R.C. Gallery, Chicago until February 27, 2010, as part of a group exhibit, "Off Center" under the auspices of the Chicago Women's Caucus for Art.
The real title of this piece could be "Uh-Oh and Proud of It." If you look closely, you can see that this work of art is a diptych, made up of two canvases, there's a joint that you can see in the right side foot. Judith started the piece and ran out of room to finish. A lesser artist would have repainted and in so doing, adjusted the scale to fit the existing canvas. But what Judith did instead, in a flash of creative problem solving, was run to get a second canvas to extend the scale of the work. In so doing, she honored and preserved the immediacy of the marks and trusted her eye and hand. She trusted her years of painting and drawing.
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