Blackbird on My Shoulder on view fall 2006 organized with support from The Margaret Virginia Philip Art Endowment Fund.
Blackbird on my Shoulder featured visual artists, writers and performers who were unshakably attached to the southeastern United States and were inspired by auto(biography) and storytelling. Stories, song and poetry were installed among photographs, drawings and sculptural installation. From the marrow of the South tales grow like beanstalks, reaching towards the patient sky. Blackbird on my Shoulder was organized with support from The Margaret Virginia Philip Art Endowment Fund.
Pink Days Azure Nights on view Spring 2006 curated by Lisa Alembik.
“This exhibition does not revolve around a theme. Pink Days, Azure Nights was borne from a call that brought forth artists unknown to the organizer in addition to new ideas from familiar ones.
This exhibition does not revolve around a theme, but connections are made. Is it something in the air, or burning questions that have evolved over centuries time of artists and culture makers? That which is occurring in the world around us is dredging up unavoidable complexities linked to raw emotion and new action. The volcanic eruptions and digging down of Julie Puttgen and Celeste Roberge knock on tectonic plates and a wryness of living. Anthony Greco reaches into the void fabricated from chaos, therein, finding a rhythm in the hurricane – the same form and energy inspiring Jennifer Beuno’s mirrored installation that projects our world fragmented into parallel systems, as she asks: “What do we desire?”; They think alongside Nell Ruby, who gives us a place to witness, a home/not-home made from sections and conflicting perspectives. As space unfolds, opening, the turning dancer in Hyun-Jean Lee’s video makes us feel connected, turning with her. Pieces segmented, running on and overlapping, cropped – still framing the simultaneously mundane and majestic moments of Terri Dilling, Brian Bishop, and Niklas Sven Vollmer. Fragmenting the moment is T.W. Meyer and Judy Parady, breaking things down to their smallest denominator. All of the artists in Pink Days, Azure Nights inspect how we look at our role in the world, or are told what our position should be – the often randomness of psychological diagnosis leads them to step into our spaces as we step into theirs.”
limbs heart tongue & teeth on view fall 2005 curated by Lisa Alembik.
“These fleshy vessels, our bodies, vehicles for our being, push into our surroundings. Form merges and turns as we respond to our environment. Moving, measuring time, we keep beat with our hearts. Gravity tethers us while the earth turns, propelled through space. We gather knowledge through our senses. Semi permeable membranes brush up against molecules that we inhale, absorb, sometimes reject.
How do we begin to understand our bodies? As babies we recognize ourselves as extensions of our parents’ hands, breasts, arms, feet. (Funny how as we age that knowing returns as sentiment when we see similarities in our own anatomy.) We learn about our apparent differences as children from our skin color to cultural or religious signifiers to our sex and size. All bodies cannot perform the same. Some require tools to operate. Some reside deep in their corporal form, grounded, breathing fully with their environs. The unbearable being floats above the body, unable to deal with mortal truths. Our body surrenders to thoughts and feelings, flooded with emotions that involuntarily take over the face or posture is determined by outlook. History, the brunt and joys of our experiences, mark the body. If we live long enough time will lay her rage on our faces, sloughing away flesh or adding weight.“
limbs heart tongue & teeth presents artists who consider how deeply we understand our bodies and how we experience our relationship to our surroundings through these fleshy vessels. Different aspects of the body as phenomenon are addressed including body language, formlessness, disability and the religious body.
Tender Landscapes on view Spring 2004 curated by Lisa Alembik.
“Artists will tread the broad, awkward, often absurd boundary between humans and nature, negotiating various roles – mediator, interloper, documenter, amateur scientist. Some directly engage the land, feeling an undeniable bond because they, of course, are of nature. A sense of responsibility calls for them to be caretakers as best they can. They dig, peel, gather, nurture. The landscape, encompassing both flora and fauna, provides solace. The natural world enters their art through a deep understanding of the landscapes subtle and monumental power, and respect for human collaboration with the earth.
The artists in Tender Landscape responded to their natural environment through curiosity, humor, or empathy. A concern for how humans affect the environment, and in turn how the environment shapes us, is a current running through the works. These artists asked their audience to carefully inspect their surroundings, to look closely and listen carefully, and be aware of the possibilities held by all-encompassing nature.”
No Agenda But Their Own on view Fall 2002 curated by Jerry Cullum.
“I tried very hard not to curate this show. It illustrates the point I’m trying to make that in the end, a few of the artists wouldn’t let me avoid it; more than one of them told me to quit trying to interest a woman curator in the topic of shifting sensibilities among women artists, and just do it.
These are not your father’s feminists.* But neither are they that misleading or meaningless rubric, “post-feminist”. They’re something else altogether. They’re simply autonomous, not paying much attention to anyone else’s attempts to restrict their artmaking and their reflections on their own condition. If they confront the fresh upsurge of misogyny and sexism in society, they do it on their own terms. If they’d rather focus on the issues suggested by their own lives, then that’s what they do, without feeling obligated to say that the personal is political.
When they think about childbearing (some of the artists are mothers, some are facing the classic decision of whether children have any place in their already crowded life), they don’t feel compelled to use the visual clichés of any political position. But neither do they feel compelled to avoid historically loaded visual metaphors; if they address “fruitfulness,” for example, they do so however they feel like doing it, and pretty much don’t care what anyone else thinks.
This air of insouciant independence carries over into work about traditional male authority figures; both literal fathers and spiritual or intellectual fathers get analyzed with an eye that makes it clear that it is the artist who’s the decision-maker here.
On the other hand, this attitude of autonomy isn’t restricted to assertive personality types; meditative dreamers have also created studies of their desires and visions independent of any mainstream demands for including or avoiding certain types of imagery. For this reason, I’d rather drop the subject after these few clues and let the artists speak for themselves. (But I can’t; I have to justify why I chose these artists, and I will.) Despite the fact that the artists decline to make it an issue, I am painfully aware that men have spoken for women for way too long already. Some of these artists have grown up speaking for themselves for so long and so intensely that it’s no longer an issue for them. Others, decades older, simply engaged in a dialogue from the beginning and never allowed it to be an issue.
Nevertheless, for a male heterosexual to curate a show about women artists is problematic. The flaws, paradoxes, and blindness involved aren’t just historical; they’re immediate and frequently all too evident. Only other people can rescue the curator from destructive self-delusion in such cases; and in this case I have to thank Lisa Alembik, whose skeptical commentary, combined with sympathy for aesthetic stances that are different from her own metaphorical preferences, provided yet another example of wryly tolerant strength and analytical independence.
Dr. Harriette Grissom provides another corrective balance in her own catalogue essay; any remaining mistakes are, of course, my own stupidity at work.
*I use this twist on the contemporary cliché with considerable forethought; it was one of the women artists whose work I particularly admire who long ago told me the joke, “How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb? ‘That’s not funny!’” By and large, these artists have confronted the perceived humorlessness of feminist topics by developing a deliberately outrageous jokiness that further exemplifies their feeling of being in control of the situation, at least internally. They’re very much aware that they’re not in control of the society around them, but they have a fresh sense of knowing why and sensing just how much or how little that can do about it. Again, they’re exactly as activist as they wanna be, and in exactly the way that they want to be.”
-Jerry Cullum, Dalton Gallery curator for No Agenda But Their Own
