Meet the Artists | Positive Fragmentation: From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation
Forefronting women artists and especially artists of color, this exhibition explores the creative impulse to take things apart (e.g. to fragment) to create something new, to question the status quo, to question assumptions about gender, race, identity, and to suggest new perspectives. This pathway offers a chance to hear directly from five of the artists speaking about their work. Choose any one or for a longer experience explore all five. Click on More details to find gallery directions as well as artmaking and wellness activities.
Meet Mickalene Thomas
In the mixed media print Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires two black female bodies recline, entwined in an intimate embrace within a colorful collaged landscape. In a nod to the art historical tradition of painting objectified female nudes, Thomas engages with and subverts this history by infusing her work with Black female sexuality and power.
Artist video (3 min.): Thomas discusses her unusual choice of material and how important it is that young Black people are able to see themselves represented in museums. As you listen to the artist, how does this experience with the artist change how you see and experience the artwork on view?
Artist(s):
Mickalene Thomas (American, b. 1971)
Title:
Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires, edition 7/25
Date:
2013
Medium(s):
mixed media collage, wooblock, screenprint and digital print
Dimensions:
38 1/2 x 80 1/2 in.
Credit Line:
Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer
Location:
Featured Exhibition Gallery, Henry Radford Hope Wing, 1st floor
Gallery Directions
After you enter gallery (Featured Exhibition Gallery, first floor), head to the right past the title wall. This artwork is on the wall to your right, midway into the gallery.
Meet Kara Walker
A person fleeing enslavement winces in horror at his severed foot, which has been cut off as punishment. Walker challenges the telling of history. Silhouetted figures add a new understanding of suffering missing from the original edition of Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War, which is enlarged behind them.
Artist video (5 min.): Walker reflects on the realities of being Black in America vs. the quality of just being. She invites us to think about how aspects of culture intertwine with identity. How does listening to Walker speak in her own words deepen your appreciation for this artwork?
Artist(s):
Kara Walker (American, b. 1969)
Title:
Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated): Scene of McPherson's Death, edition 21/35
Date:
2005
Medium(s):
offset lithography and screenprint
Dimensions:
53 x 39 in.
Credit Line:
Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer
Location:
Featured Exhibition Gallery, Henry Radford Hope Wing, 1st floor
IN GALLERY: Each person is made up of several identities that intersect, fragment, and morph into one another. Imagine yourself as fragments. Each piece represents a part of who you are. Think about what each piece would represent. Choose one question to ponder or try to answer them all if you’re ready for a deep dive.
Which pieces are smaller or larger? Why? Which pieces have been shaped by the cultures you identify with? If you had to choose one piece to represent who you are at your core, which piece would you choose?
AT HOME: Do the activity above, then find some paper of various sizes, shapes, and colors. Tear, cut, or otherwise alter the paper you found to represent the pieces of yourself you identified. Assemble your pieces together to create a self-portrait. You can add other art materials and other drawn elements to complete your portrait, if you choose.
Gallery Directions
After you enter the gallery (Featured Exhibition Gallery, first floor), go to the left past the title wall. When you’re midway into the gallery, this artwork will be to your right, facing you, in the middle of a freestanding wall with other artwork on either side.
Meet Lorna Simpson
In Details, when you first look at the body fragment, a cropped image of hands, what story starts to form in your mind? Now read the text fragment. What do you wonder? How does the story change? Simpson questions memory, representation, and assumptions. She interrupts thoughts, intervening with intentional ambiguity and allowing space for possibility.
Artist video (3 1/2 min.): Simpson talks about her influences, finding inspiration, the lifelong thread in her work, and what her choice of materials and process means to her. How does this experience with the artist change how you see and experience the artwork on view?
Artist(s):
Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
Title:
Details (member), edition 35/40
Date:
1996
Medium(s):
photogravure with screenprinted text
Dimensions:
10 x 8 in.
Credit Line:
Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer
Location:
Featured Exhibition Gallery, Henry Radford Hope Wing, 1st floor
IN GALLERY: Create a cropped photo of a body part or an image revealing only a fragment from your own lived experience. What word or phrase would you add to the photo to interrupt the stories people might tell in their heads if they saw only the photo? Taking inspiration from Simpson’s interventions, what phrase might make your cropped photo interesting in a new way?
AT HOME: Do the activity above, then use materials to make your collage. Fragments of images, words and individual letters can be cut from old newspapers or magazine then reassembled to convey something new.
Gallery Directions
After you enter the gallery (Featured Exhibition Gallery, first floor), continue straight ahead to the back of the gallery. This artwork is on left end of the back wall of the gallery.
Meet Wangechi Mutu
Fragmented vintage medical illustrations of uterine tumors are combined with fragments from fashion magazines, back issues of National Geographic, plus glitter, fur, and other elements to create heads or beings. Mutu has given each one a personality and a mouth, so they can speak for themselves.
Pull up a gallery stool and listen to Mutu speak for herself.
Artist video (<15 min): Wangechi Mutu offers a beautiful sense of who she is as a being. From her studio in Nairobi, she shares how her life experiences impact her work -- including her love of nature and her fascination with women. She notes “society worships the image of a woman but denigrates the actual human being of a woman”. How does your understanding of her work expand as you get to know her?
Artist(s):
Wangechi Mutu (Kenyan, b. 1972)
Title:
Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors: Ectopic Pregnancy, edition 14/25
Date:
2006
Medium(s):
glitter, ink, collage on found medical illustration paper
Dimensions:
23 x 17 in.
Credit Line:
Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer
Location:
Featured Exhibition Gallery, Henry Radford Hope Wing, 1st floor
IN GALLERY: Choose one Uterine Tumor to look more closely at. What might it say? Choose another one. What conversation might unfold as these two speak for themselves?
AT HOME: Imagine what this artwork might say or sound like if it could speak. Find a piece of paper. Sketch a speech bubble and fill in words this being is saying.
Gallery Directions
After you enter the gallery (Featured Exhibition Gallery, first floor), continue straight ahead to the back of the gallery. Mutu’s *Uterine Tumors* are on the left half of the back wall of the gallery.
Meet Julie Mehretu
In Six Bardos, the abstract gestures appear spontaneous, yet the process is meticulous. Mehretu collaborated with a team of master printers. Instead of separating the colorways in the printing process, different colored inks were applied by hand to a single copper plate with a wad of fabric.
Artist video (8 min.): Pull up a gallery stool. Julie Mehretu talks about the complexity of the process and what it’s like to work in collaboration with professional printmaking studios, like Crown Point Press, where we see her working on a plate and pulling a print. She talks about losing herself in music to fuel creativity, making marks that are percussive and improvisational. When look again at her artwork, what do you notice that you didn’t notice before?
Artist(s):
Julie Mehretu (American, b. Ethiopia, 1970)
Title:
Six Bardos: Transmigration, edition 23/25
Date:
2018
Medium(s):
aquatint
Dimensions:
98 x 74 in.
Credit Line:
Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer
Location:
Featured Exhibition Gallery, Henry Radford Hope Wing, 1st floor
Gallery Directions
After you enter the gallery (Featured Exhibition Gallery, first floor), go to the left past the title wall. This artwork is hanging on a partial wall straight ahead.
Meet Judy Chicago
The Through the Flower prints were done at Tamarind [Institute]. They are lithographs. One of the challenges was that at that time a lot of lithographs were done on stone with a special kind of pencil. But the problem was for me in my work, which involves very delicate fades, the range from dark to light on stone was very limited. Anything lighter than thirty percent or darker than seventy percent on the gray scale would disappear. So in order to do these prints, I ended up spraying what is called tusche, and then I wanted them to be very pale and so I wanted more transparency. The man who ran Tamarind at the time, Clinton Adams, was quite upset with the amount of transparency that I wanted to use. He said the prints would fade, and he was right in terms of the Through the Flower Twice, the diptych; it did fade, but I like the pale quality.
As to the title of these images, they are exactly what they are called: Through the Flower. I was working on images involving trying to move through the limits of the construct of femininity into a larger and freer space. This was the same time in the early 1970s when I started the first feminist art program at Fresno State—now Cal State, Fresno—that I brought to Cal Arts.
Hear Judy Chicago discuss her print series Through the Flower in this audio track from the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Gallery Directions
After you enter the gallery (Featured Exhibition Gallery, first floor), go straight ahead to the left of the title wall. This series of prints will be about halfway down the wall to your left.
Judy Chicago discusses Mary Queen of Scots
Mary Queen of Scots was done at Cirrus Editions in Los Angeles, which was founded by Jean Milant. It’s been going for more than fifty years. In the case of that image, it relates to the Great Ladies paintings that I was doing in the early 1970s, which were my effort to translate my research into women’s history and my discovery about all these important women into images. The print was originally done as a lithograph, but I couldn’t get the color to work in the way I wanted to in terms of the fades, so Jean suggested overlaying a silkscreen on top, a flat, a very thinly inked flat, that subdued the color. And I thought that was very appropriate, especially for Mary Queen of Scots, who as we know was killed by her own sister.
Hear Judy Chicago discuss Mary Queen of Scots in this audio track from the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Gallery Directions
After you enter the gallery (Featured Exhibition Gallery, first floor), go straight ahead to the left of the title wall. This print will be about halfway down the wall to your left.
Meet Christiane Baumgartner
I’m Christiane Baumgartner. Stairway to Heaven are five handmade woodcuts related to each other. They are all cut by hand just with a sharp knife by myself, so it took me several months. And they are printed by hand in my studio with very simple tools using a baren and help by just one assistant. I made this work in 2019 as a commission for the Québec City Biennial Manif d’art, who had invited me to come to Canada for a residency. At this time, I had made just several nature-related works and was attracted to water, to the sheer force of the water. So in Québec, I took many photographs of different waterfalls and went back to one place on different times of the day, sitting there in front of the falling water for hours, listening to the ongoing noise.
Later, back in Leipzig, I decided to concentrate not so much on the falling water but on the horizon itself. For me the horizontal line, the silver line, is very important in this piece, and this is the reason why I hang the works in steps to keep the horizontal line in one line. And this brought me to the title: Stairway to Heaven (Himmelsleiter). It contains for me the horizon, the fixed points we as humans relate to. But in contrary to this, the falling water shows a vertical force that grates in the stone millimeter by millimeter over millions of years. This idea of the infinite, which never ends and is stronger than us, I think that’s wonderful.
Hear Christiane Baumgartner discuss her print series Stairway to Heaven in this audio track from the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Gallery Directions
After you enter the gallery (Featured Exhibition Gallery, first floor), go straight ahead all the way to the back wall, then turn right. This series of five prints will be to your left in the corner of the gallery.
Meet Barbara Takenaga
Hello. My name is Barbara Takenaga. I have a series of prints in this wonderful exhibition. They were all printed at Shark’s Ink in Lyons, Colorado, where I’ve worked with Bud Shark, the master printer, for many years.
Although I’m primarily a painter now, I got my MFA at the University of Colorado way back in the day in printmaking, and I’ve always loved prints. I like how the process is so primary, paramount really, and that there are certain rules you have to follow as well as kind of pushing against the rules when you can. I also like the fact that prints are very democratic in a way, that they are not outrageously expensive, that many people can enjoy one image. And it also reflects a lot about the way our society deals with multiples.
Hear Barbara Takenaga discuss her printmaking process in this audio track from the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Gallery Directions
After you enter gallery (Featured Exhibition Gallery, first floor), head to the right past the title wall. This artist's work is on the wall to your right, about 3/4 of the way into the gallery.
Meet Nicola López
With Urban Transformation, I started as I often do with a general idea of the pieces that I wanted to work with, a general idea of the visual elements, but without a fixed vision of what the final pieces would be like exactly. I drew and then eventually printed out and cut a number of different technological pieces: little cables and pieces of fencing, bolts, nuts, cords, hooks, all sorts of different kinds of detritus, technological detritus. In the end, I had these piles of different printed and cut-out elements—and then I got to play with them. And with the Urban Transformation series what happened was that all the elements eventually got put back together in what ended up being six very unique improvised collages.
Hear Nicola López discuss her print series Urban Transformation in this audio track from the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Gallery Directions
After you enter the gallery (Featured Exhibition Gallery, first floor), go to the left past the title wall. When you’re midway into the gallery, this artwork will be to your right, on the back side of the title wall.
Meet Swoon (Caledonia Curry)
Hi. My name is Caledonia Curry, and this block-print portrait is called Yaya. It’s a portrait of a friend of mine, the artist James Hough [pronounced “Hew”] who also goes by the nickname of Yaya. And in the portrait, he’s creating an artwork and also maybe becoming that artwork at the same time. So, I first met Yaya when he was serving a life sentence in Graterford penitentiary for a crime that he committed when he was a teenager, who was self-medicating a lifetime of trauma with drugs and who was in the grips of a PTSD flashback.
And at the time I met him he was now nearly fifty, and you know, he’d read and could quote from every book imaginable, he was this incredible artist, and also a really compassionate leader to his fellow inmates. And I knew then, as did the Restorative Justice program I was working with at Philadelphia Mural Arts, that this person bore little relationship to that once-violent teenager, and that jailing minors for life is just not a humane practice. And the laws around life sentences for minors have since been changed, thanks to the tireless work of many, including James and Philadelphia Mural Arts, and he’s now an artist who travels the country and who teaches others about healing trauma through his own experiences.
Hear Swoon (Caledonia Curry) discuss Yaya in this audio track from the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Gallery Directions
After you enter the gallery (Featured Exhibition Gallery, first floor), turn immediately to the right. This print will be on the far wall straight ahead of you.
Swoon discusses Dawn and Gemma
Hi. My name is Caledonia Curry, and I also go by the artist name Swoon, which was a pen name that I adopted many years ago when I was doing work out on the street. And this piece is entitled Dawn and Gemma. It’s a portrait of a childhood friend of mine with her new baby in her arms, and it went through a few stages to become the piece that you see on the wall. So, its original incarnation is a twelve-foot-high-by-twelve-foot-wide, hand-carved, linoleum block print, and I’ve only made a few of these, like, mega-prints, but this was one of them. And then because as a printmaker I love to make variations and permutations from a single image, I decided to make a version of this which wasn’t twice my height and then some, so I shrunk it down into this little silkscreen print that you see before you. And the silkscreen-on-paper is then cut out and then wheat-pasted onto a found object, in this case a window because I love architecture. I started making these prints as paste-ups for the street, in fact, so the window speaks to that history a bit. And then after pasting it down, I spend some time painting it, you know, choosing colors which suit this particular iteration, and which respond to the colors and textures of the objects it’s pasted to, until I arrive at a new artwork that feels complete.
Hear Swoon (Caledonia Curry) discuss Dawn and Gemma in this audio track from the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Gallery Directions
After you enter the gallery (Featured Exhibition Gallery, first floor), turn immediately to your right. This artwork will be on the wall to your right, near the corner of the gallery.
Swoon discusses Thalassa
Hello. My name is Caledonia Curry, and I also go by the artist name Swoon because I started wheat-pasting portraits out on the street many years ago, and the name stuck. So, this piece is called Thalassa, and it’s named for a Greek primordial incarnation of the sea. And as I drew this piece, I was thinking about humanity’s relationship to the sea and also my own relationship to water, because I was at that moment in a state of grief and shock over the BP oil spill that had happened in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, near my home state of Florida. And so much life was lost and there was such a feeling of helplessness. But eventually I found the thing that I wanted to draw was the place inside each of us where the sea is our mother. And in some ways I feel the freest when I’m in water, and so that spirit is really alive inside this portrait as well.
The model of this portrait is my dear friend, the poet Naima Penniman, and the original block print from which this scaled-down version was created is almost fifteen feet high. It was the biggest block print I’d ever made, and it took hundreds of hours to carve. You know, but I’d say whoever you are, Thalassa is the part of you that knows deep down that what you really are is the crest of a wave, which is also inseparable from the infinite sea.
Hear Swoon (Caledonia Curry) discuss Thalassa in this audio track from the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Gallery Directions
After you enter the gallery (Featured Exhibition Gallery, first floor), turn immediately to your right. This artwork will be near the corner of the gallery on a riser, leaning against the wall to your right.
Credit
Support for this exhibition and related education and outreach programs has been made possible by a grant from the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.
Audio tracks for Christiane Baumgartner, Judy Chicago, Nicola López, Barbara Takenaga, and Swoon (Caledonia Curry) are courtesy of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
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