To celebrate my 100th episode, I take you through my personal journey into the visual arts and the women artists that shaped me to live more boldly. Highlighted is the first woman to toss me from complacency to creating my own artistic path: Louise Nevelson.
In this episode, I also announce the winners of the 100th Episode Celebration Giveaway. Thank you to everyone who took part and for your support of my efforts to celebrate women artists and makers.
Winner #1: Melanie Pennington Special edition t-shirt designed by Laurence de Valmy in collaboration with Art Girl Rising and Kahn Gallery:
Winner #2: Ariana Tavares Two “Zines” celebrating Feminist and Queer Art History from the designers Made by Women
Shout out to the artists who took part in the 100th episode celebration give away. I included their websites and encourage you to explore their work. 🙂
Christine Lyons: christinaelyons.com; Ariana Tavares: ariantavares.com; Jean Rill Alberto: withheartbyhand; Kathryn Hart: kathryndhart.com; Sally Brown: sallyjanebrown.com; Kathy Piercy: 100years100womenart.com; Andrea Filiatrault: artistsmakeart.com; Gina Lee Robbins: ginaleerobbins.com; Kat Zagaria: katzagaria.com; Agathe Bouton: agathebouton.com; Melanie Pennington: melaniepennington.com; Valerie Carmet: valeriecarmet.com; Alex Bigatti: alexbigattiart.com
Resources for this podcast episode include Museum of Modern Art, H. H. Arnason and Marla F. Prather’s seminal text History of Modern Art, New Britain Museum of American Art, Tate Museum, curator and writer Edward Henning, Julia Bryan-Wilson from her book, “Louise Nevelson’s Modernisms,” The Art Story–special and heartfelt thanks to the women artists Laurence de Valmy and Made by Women, you so inspire me!
Transcript: Hello Everyone! This Bernadine from Beyond the Paint podcast I want to thank everyone who participated in my 100th episode celebration give away. Before I announce the winners, I want to give a deserved shout out to the artists who entered. In the podcast notes, I have included their websites, and encourage you to explore their work.
Artists include Christine Lyons, Ariana Tavares, Jean Rill Alberto, Kathryn Hart, Sally Brown, Kathy PIerce, Andrea Filiatrault, Gina Lee Robbins, Kat Zagria, Agathe Bouton, Melanie Pennington, Valerie Carmet and Alex Bigatti.
The winner of the special edition tee shirt, designed by Laurence de Valmy in collaboration with Art Girl Rising and Kahn Gallery is Melanie Pennington Congratulations!
The winner of two “zines” by the designers Made by Women is Ariana Tavares. Thank you again for your participation.
Welcome to Episode 100! As I was thinking about crafting the content for this episode this milestone, I looked to other podcasters commemoration of their milestone episodes or anniversaries. Many share their favorite past episodes or excerpts of episodes. I decided instead to reposition your audio view from the women artists I have celebrated, and the works of art we journeyed through together in this series’ archives, for a more intimate look into events that catapulted me into the visual arts and the woman artist I first fell so deeply in love with: 20th century artist Louise Nevelson, She completely tossed me out of complacency into living a more emboldened life.
My first transformative experience in the visual arts before my engagement with Louise Nevelson was from a landscape painting, the 19th century work, “Vale of St Thomas, Jamaica” by Hudson River School painter Frederic Church. It was within this luscious, verdant panoramic vista, my love affair with the visual arts first began. I was a young mother with a toddler son looking for things to do, and the museum Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford offered free admission on Thursdays.
It was in the galleries spaces and my contemplation of works, like the Church painting that I didn’t just “see” art, I experienced it. My senses became enlivened, some of the works that graced the galleries drew me in so deeply I wept. The repeated visits with my son who delighted in the conflicting juxtapositions of forms in Surrealist paintings like Salvador Dali’s “Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach” What appears to be a river is a dog muzzle…(needs revision) influenced me to change my major from English to Art History and then progress towards a graduate degree in American Studies from Trinity College.
I discovered women artists through my internship and as a docent at the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut. It was here my passion crystallized through the visual expressions by women like Louise Nevelson and my first experience with her assemblage work “Untitled” 1985
In her rectilinear boxes of carefully arranged wooden objects she gathered from urban debris, I found myself seeing into the art, seeing her inner life portrayed in the work. It is through Nevelson’s artistic voice and through other women artist’s artistic voices, I found myself thinking, seeing and speaking in new and daring ways. Female artists, those creative women tugged at me, pulled me from my traditional ideas and the limitations of domestic life into a new life filled with work I love as an educator and writer and for the last 99 episodes, a podcaster.
Nevelson’s art is a manifestation of her desires. She said, “My theory is that when we come on this earth, many of us are ready-made. Nature gives you these gifts. There is no denying that Beethoven came with music in his soul. Picasso was drawing like an angel in the crib. You’re born with it.
I claim for myself I was born this way. From earliest childhood I knew I was going to be an artist. I felt like an artist. So I have that blessing, and there was never a time that I questioned it or doubted it.
Some people are here on earth and never knew what they wanted. I call them unfinished business. I had a blueprint all my life from childhood and I knew exactly what I demanded of this world. Now, some people may not demand of life as much as I did. But I wanted one thing that I thought belonged to me. I wanted the whole show. For me, that is living.”
The first time I read these words from Nevelson’s mouth was over 20 years ago. I get emotional with nearly same intensity as I read them now. As a young woman, wife, mother, I did not “demand” from this world, I was shaped by expectations from my upbringing in a Italian-American home, to form into the limiting and narrow roles my small world demanded of me. Nevelson articulated and poked at my muffled voice, I too am an artist.
And through the words of Nevelson, I was able to make the shift in my life and the prescribed roles of mother and wife, not to abandon those roles and responsibilities, there was joy and purpose in those relationships, but to shift my perceptions and to carve out in my days, with time for me.
Nevelson said, “I don’t say life was easy. For forty years, I wanted to jump out of windows. But I did feel I had the strength and the creative ability. There was never any doubt about that. No one could move me till I got what I wanted–on my terms on earth. And I do. And it takes, maybe not the greatest mind, but it did take courage. And it did take despair. And the hardship gave me total freedom.”
Those words have burned into spirit and throughout my cherished roles of raising children, the joy of grandchildren and the deep love for my husband, I am a seeker; my art is to be a conduit, to share with others the story of art, to help others see through the visual expression the world in new ways.
In Nevelson, I was not only exposed to her art, but also to the individual woman who maintained a flair for the theatrical in her eccentric dress, her hair wrapped in printed scarves, thick fake eyelashes and flamboyant manner—she manifested this theatrical sensibility into her work. This included controlling the light and space within which the viewer experienced her work.
Nevelson’s works “embody stories from her cumulative experiences as a Jewish child relocated to America from Russia, as an artist in training in New York City and Germany, and as a hard-working successful woman within the male-dominated realm of the New York gallery system.” She is able to as theorized by the artist and Nevelson’s teacher Hans Hoffman, “to transform the material with which the artist works back into the sphere of the spirit…..to attach an emotional dimension,” which Hoffman identified as “spirituality.”
Let’s take a closer look at her characteristic assemblages paying close attention to her process. “Untitled” from the New Britain Museum of American Art’s collection is a smaller version of the iconic large wooden walls or environments fitted with individual boxes filled with scores of carefully arranged found objects–usually sawed-up fragments of furniture or woodwork rescued from old destroyed houses or school. She then painted her work in a uniform matte black or white or reflective gold. What is different in Nevelson’s assemblages from traditional “sculpture” and sometimes her works are referred to as sculptures, traditional sculptures are defined as a three-dimensional form created by carving, molding, casting. Nevelson’s boxes and walls are formed by assembling existing pieces of wood and by cutting some of the pieces to be assembled. “Nevelson moved into a new terrain as she used discarded architectural ornaments and random pieces of wood to create abstract forms and symbols.” In the context of her time and this during the earlier part of the 20th century, as a woman, she is an innovator.
In her early found-object assemblages, Nevelson scavenged her materials from gutters and junkyards–“reusing scraps that bore the scars of their previous lives.” Her knowledge of wood stemmed in part from her childhood, her Jewish family emigrated from Kiev, Ukraine to Rockland Maine when she was a child, her father worked as a woodcutter and lumber merchant. As a female artist, as a woman Nevelson, who referred to herself as “an architect” and a “builder” “upended gendered conventions about the proper techniques for female artists.” (reference) Julia Bryan Wilson
Dawn’s Wedding Feast (1959) is composed of “junk” that achieves a quality of decayed elegance” (history of modern art) through shallow boxes filled with assemblages of whitewashed baluster, finials, posts, moldings and other architectural elements.” Nevelson revealed to Museum of Modern Art about Dawn’s Wedding Feast, that she “saw the four main wall sculptures as wedding chapels. As part of that trousseau, Nevelson made a wedding cake, a chest, a mirror and a pillow. She made guests in the form of hanging columns.” Nevelson’s walls create environments with a variety of emotional and poetic connotations.
I have experienced several of her works, my favorite by far is “Sky Cathedral” a black, richly layered work made of shallow open boxes “fitted together like a jig saw puzzle.” The boxes, their sizes vary contain reliefs and landscapes, their contents include salvaged wood bits, spindles, chair parts, architectural ornaments, scroll-sawed fragments. Some of the arrangements are irregular and asymmetrical, others are sharply cut, as if with tools, and are arranged in more orderly geometrical patterns. All the boxes and its contents are painted in uniform matte black there is a play of “flatness and recession, straight lines and curves, overlapping and vacancies. By painting them all black, Nevelson obscures their original identities. Nevelson said, “I don’t think I chose it for black, I think it chose me for saying something. You see, it says more for me than anything else. For me it is the total color. It means totality. It means: contains all.”
For me, you don’t just step into this space between yourself and the work. My looking experience encompassed a kind of dance, an interplay between my body stepping forward, stepping back, sashaying across, identifying individual objects and then taking them all in as a whole, the multitude of objects, scraps of moldings, dowels, spindles layered and juxtaposed into compelling arrangements. As I shared earlier, the color black unifies the composition, obscuring the individual objects. Nevelson said about her fascination with the color black, “When I fell in love with black, it contained all color. It wasn’t a negation of color. It was an acceptance. Because black encompasses all colors. Black is the most aristocratic color of all…You can be quiet and it contains the whole thing.”
Her fascination with the color black became mine manifested through a change in my wardrobe; I started to pour myself into black, the nuances of black tones in my jerseys and shirts and pants; even when I chose other colors, I, like Nevelson’s sculptures unified the garments in one tone like brown or grey; my lipstick, always bright matte red. It evoked that little bit of theater and a nod to my mentor Nevelson.
Her works connect with spirit because they “evoke the sense of a shrine or place of devotion.” There is this altar like character in the total wall or landscape. Even the lighting of her works within the gallery space has psychological effects. White and gold which seem to imply purity and the dawn respond best to bright light while the black when dimly lit, their darkness conjure shadows and mystery. Nevelson wrote that in her art, she sought ” the in-between places, the dawns and dusk, the objective world, the heavenly spheres, the places between the land and the sea.”
About her process, Nevelson once said, “I make collages. I join the shattered world creating a new harmony.” The work aligns with her philosophy put into practice, “she put remnants of architectural structures found on the streets into rectangular containers. In doing so, she created a clear structure which compels the viewer into a mysterious darkness.” She broke the frame of traditions and she was able to accomplish this through courage. Nevelson said “I think the most important thing to do in living is to do it. One has to have courage really and one must gamble with life to really move into the areas where they can fulfill themselves.”
Louise Nevelson, her life, her art reflects in me a blueprint for living. She envisioned and created her path through constant artistic production, through hard work, not through feminist activism or platform. It was her way out of entrenched sexism in a male-dominated industry. Nevelson broke every standard of what an artist was supposed to look like at the time. This really speaks to me because Nevelson never let fear or the constraints of male-dominancy get in her way. She was a trailblazer for women artists.
Louise Nevelson liberated me so completely from both imposed and self-imposed constraints in my life; I too am blazing my own path—this podcast series is one way for me to share the ideas, the voices, the inner lives of other trailblazing women, through works of art with others, with you, my listeners. My hope is that their voices will resonate within you, to awaken within you those parts of yourself that are laden in complacency, so you, like the women, can live more boldly.