Resources
ABOUT US / SERVICES / OUR CLIENTS / STORE / CONTACT
Video | Biala: The Rash Acts of Rescue and Escape
The event is part of our monthly series Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression, which is generously sponsored by Allianz Partners.
This virtual event took place on Wednesday, January 6 at 12pm EST
Presented by the Fritz Ascher Society in New York
Lecture by Jason Andrew with Julia K. Gleich
Introduced by Rachel Stern, Exe Dir of the Fritz Ascher Society in New York
Supplemental information (click to download):
“Ford Madox Ford and Janice Biala,” by Jason Andrew, PN Review, July-August 2008
This article discussed the first meeting and subsequent life of English novelist Ford Madox Ford and American painter Janice Biala.
“No more Parades End,” by Sara Haslam, Times Literary Supplement, June 2018
This article discusses Ford Madox Ford’s last library and what it tell us about ‘the Tietjens saga.”
Have a question or comment about this lecture?
About this Event
Biala (1903-2000) was a Polish born American painter whose career stretched over eight decades and spanned two continents. Through it all, she retained an intimacy in her art rooted in Old World Europe—sensibilities that began with memories of her childhood in a Polish village, shaped by School of Paris painters like Bonnard, Matisse and Braque, inspired by Velázquez and the Spanish Masters, and broadened by the community of loft-living artists in Post World War II Downtown New York.
Her arrival in Paris in 1930 from New York City marked the beginning of an extraordinary life: one full of adventure, a passion for literature, and an appetite for art. On that fateful trip she met and fell in love with the English Novelist Ford Madox Ford. Ford shared with her all he knew and introduced her to the many artists forging a new Modernism including Brancusi, Matisse, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein among others. Biala became Ford’s most fierce advocate remaining devoted to him, at his side, until his death in Deauville, France on June 26, 1939. Biala’s commitment to Ford did not soften at his death.
In this lecture, Jason Andrew shares his research and insight into Biala’s harrowing effort to traveled back to the South of France, which was in Mussolini’s crosshairs, to make the daring rescue of Ford’s manuscripts and library, just as war would consume all of Europe. Joining Andrew in this presentation is choreographer Julia K. Gleich, who will bring voice to the letters of Janice Biala.
New Publication: Tworkov, Towards Nirvana
Published on the occasion of the following exhibitions: Tworkov: Towards Nirvana / Works from the 70s, January 14-March 20, 2021, VAN DOREN WAXTER, 23 East 73rd Street, New York NY 10021, Tworkov: Drawings from the 70s, February 6-May 1, 2021, MINUS SPACE, 16 Main Street, Brooklyn NY 11201
$40.00
Published on the occasion of the following exhibitions
Tworkov: Towards Nirvana / Works from the 70s
January 14-March 20, 2021
VAN DOREN WAXTER
23 East 73rd Street, New York NY 10021
www.vandorenwaxter.com
Tworkov: Drawings from the 70s
February 6-May 1, 2021
MINUS SPACE
16 Main Street, Brooklyn NY 11201
www.minusspace.com
ISBN: 978-1-7325933-3-6
Excerpt of essay written by curator Jason Andrew
While history has pinned Tworkov to a period of the 50s, he broke away from the Abstract Expressionist movement at the very height of his own success. Seen by many as radical,[i] the debut of his new monochromatic paintings at the Gertrude Kasle Gallery in Detroit in April 1969, was the arrival of an art less emotive, more stark, more Spartan. “I wanted to get away from the extremely subjective focus of Abstract-Expressionist painting.” Tworkov said, “I am tired of the artist’s agonies […] I wanted something outside myself, something less subjective.”[ii]
Excerpt from Of the Stark and the Spartan: Tworkov in the 70s written by Jason Andrew:
This radical change, years in the making, was consistent with Tworkov’s thoughtfulness and courage and found connections with the generation of artists nearly forty years his younger, which engaged Tworkov at Yale. He recognized their interest in seriality, and shared in their methods to skirt expressiveness and emotion. This generation included Chuck Close, Jennifer Bartlett, Judith Bernstein, Nancy Graves, Brice Marden, Howardena Pindell, Richard Serra and William T. Williams to name a few.
His tenure at Yale coincided this stylistic shift toward diagrammatic configurations spurred by a renewed interest in geometry and mathematics. Using the rectangle as a measurement tool and foundation of his compositions, Tworkov moved away from any reliance on automatism and turned to a methodical creative process. In his words: “I soon arrived at an elementary system of measurements implicit in the geometry of the rectangle which became the basis for simple images that I had deliberately given a somewhat illusionistic cast.”[iii] While this system did not exclude spontaneity and fresh invention, it did impose an element of the mechanical and calculated. And it was this decisively imposed predictability that would undo decades of painting that for Tworkov, history still most remembers.
When these new structured paintings debuted in a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971, curator Marcia Tucker championed the work:
These pictures—sensuous, personal, endowed with extraordinary clarity and formal intelligence—testify to the energy and timeliness of an artist who has, for over forty years, chosen the path of most resistance in order to challenge his own vision and ours.[iv]
[i] “Tworkov: Radical Pro,” was the title of an Art News article written by Louis Finkelstein and published in April 1964.
[ii] Tworkov, Jack. "On My Outlook as a Painter: A Memoir." Leonardo, International Journal of the Contemporary Artist 7: 2 (Spring 1974), 116.
[iii] Tworkov in Leonardo, 116.
[iv] Tucker, Marcia in Jack Tworkov: Recent Paintings, February 5–March 14, 1971, Whitney Museum of American Art, exhibition brochure.
New Publication: Joan Witek: Paintings from the 1980s
I first met Joan Witek in the Fall of 2003 while coordinating an exhibition of her work at the Kouros Gallery. During a visit to the studio, out of the storage racks, Joan pulled Las Meninas (1980-81).
Published on the occasion of Joan Witek’s solo exhibition Paintings from the 1980s,
organized in collaboration with Artist Estate Studio LLC, at MINUS SPACE, 2020.
Introduction by Matthew Deleget; Essay by Jason Andrew
Design by Peter Freeby for Artist Estate Studio
Printed by danny luk at arcoiris nyc, inc.
Published by Artist Estate Studio for MINUS SPACE, Brooklyn, NY, 2020
68 pages, softcover, color
11 x 8.5 inches / 28 x 21.6 cm
ISBN: 978-0-578-76802-1
Excerpt of essay written by curator Jason Andrew
I first met Joan Witek in the Fall of 2003 while coordinating an exhibition of her work at the Kouros Gallery. During a visit to the studio, out of the storage racks, Joan pulled Las Meninas (1980-81). When I inquired as to other paintings from the period, she pointed rather embarrassingly to a tall thick roll wrapped in plastic leaning in the far corner of her studio. Intrigued, it has been my desire to re-present this body of work since that time.
The impact of seeing Las Meninas was resounding. Its surface was unlike anything I had experienced. A thin slightly visible blue chalk line laid out the horizontal composition. Thick black marks made with oil stick layered in regularity, and graphite applied to the surface to temper the level of light.
Lee Krasner (1908-1984), Black and White Squares No. 1, 1948 Oil and enamel on linen 24 1/8 × 30 in. (61.3 × 76.2 cm). Private Collection. Photo: Diego Flores, courtesy Barbican Centre. © 2020 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Known for reductive, even geometric abstractions, it was curious to learn that Witek’s compositions, all of them, originate from a single narrative source. “The painting expresses my Spanish flair,” she told me. Witek’s father was Spanish, and as she described in her studio notes, “the title first came to me and I didn’t know what it was—eventually discovered it was Velázquez’s title.” Her notes continue: “Associations with me: Spanish / the Spanish love of black / named after the women who cared for the princesses at court—my being a woman / Spanish.”
The repetitiveness and regularity of Witek’s works seemingly link her to Agnes Martin. However, Witek’s approach—the gathering, sorting, collating, associating, patterning and the initiation of actions and proceedings—categorically moves her past Minimalism and closer to that of Process Art. In this regard, Witek shares a sharp sensibility with her peer the sculptor Jackie Winsor who described the origins of her work, “These things of mine certainly aren’t minimal. They’re not reduced to the most elementary things. The focus is not the cleaning up of abstract expressionism.”8 The same can be said for Witek.
Memories of Underdevelopment (1981), acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in 1983, was the painting that followed Las Meninas. Titled after the Cuban film Memorias del Subdesarrollo (1968), Witek’s studio notes indicate that she first responded to the subject through “organic” drawings in 1968, predating the painting. Having seen the film again on television, she noted “how much of a portrait [the painting] was of me.”
“I’ve always wanted to make incongruous things go together: like squares being portraits,” she once said, “In the 1970s the square was so important. The square as a square was not enough for me. I loved its containment but I wanted the square to be filled.”
That Witek sees many of her works from this period as self-portraits is astonishing—the clarity of a mark and its interpretation as figure / personality.
Joan Witek, Edward Teller’s Dream, 1982, Oil and graphite on canvas 68 1/2 × 119 3/4 in (174 × 304.2 cm)
Introductory Glyph (1982) references her passion for Pre-Columbian Mayan hieroglyphs. This towering painting features at its center a single emblem glyph. Tall and sculpted, the totemic offering mimics an ancient stela whose carved glyphs give the reader a sense of place, situation, or setting for the telling of an event or history. “This fits perfectly with my hieroglyphs and their decipherment,” Witek said describing this work, “There is a constant language throughout waiting for that decipherment.”
In her review of this painting exhibited at Rosa Esman in 1984, Lowery Stokes Sims deciphers the painting this way:
The different proportions of the glyphs became imbued with specific meanings that carry into other paintings […] in Introductory Glyph the expanse of the central glyph, surrounded as it is by twelve registers of regularly placed strokes (larger ones on the bottom two rows), creates a decidedly negative space (a compositional black hole) that literally pulls the space dramatically back into the center. To counterbalance this effect, and to achieve a visual electricity that is comparable to that of the diamond-shaped interstices between the bottoms and tops of the rows of glyphs, Witek places a jagged edge down the center of the large glyph.
Edward Teller’s Dream (1982) is a unique subject for Witek as it makes use of the traditional association of black with death. The genesis of the idea for the painting is fully described in her studio notes about having seen the Teller documentary called A is for Atom, B is for Bomb:
the subject… is the emptiness of the vast ‘field’ of vertical four-inch strokes. Here, hopefully, opposites operate and after the vastness is realized, the backup is the tenseness of all those uninterrupted strokes. The painting needed to be ten feet to create that emptiness.
Emptiness is experienced through the repetitive architecture of Witek’s strokes,—what the artist once referred to as “geometrically common destiny”—a bundle of which stack up like a tomb at the bottom center of this painting. And we are right to read the painting this way, as searching for the structure of the composition, Witek studied the architecture of Egyptian funerary tombs.
Jason Andrew reviews Joan Snyder at CANADA
In a 1976 Cincinnati Enquirer review of Joan Snyder’s paintings, the reviewer, Owen Findsen, surmised that she had “picked up a little of this, a little of that … and made it all uglier.” While he found her work offensive, even questioning it’s validity, for those like me who have come to love Snyder’s work, it couldn’t be a bigger compliment. Joan Snyder paints her world from the inside out.
Joan Snyder, installation view. Left: Ode to Summer (2019); Right: Weeping Cherry Tree & Thee (2020) / Courtesy CANADA
Contributed by Jason Andrew
In a 1976 Cincinnati Enquirer review of Joan Snyder’s paintings, the reviewer, Owen Findsen, surmised that she had “picked up a little of this, a little of that … and made it all uglier.” While he found her work offensive, even questioning it’s validity, for those like me who have come to love Snyder’s work, it couldn’t be a bigger compliment. Joan Snyder paints her world from the inside out.
Unabashedly expressive, her paintings are born of sorrow and moods, loss and struggles, and yes, peace and love as well. The new paintings now on view at CANADA echo a familiar cantata – an unapologetic narrative. “They are a form of keeping time,” Helen Molesworth writes in her witty catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition, “of remaining present, of acting as both observer and recorder.” The catalogue also features commentary by Wallace Whitney and Sean Scully.
Consistent throughout her work since the 1960s is Snyder’s use of a “stroke” – a heavy gesture succinctly pulled horizontally. Conceived as an alternative to the Great God Grid, this mark can be interpreted as a cancellation, a kind of crossing out. At first, at least, it was distinctly her own. Each stroke works in tandem with saturated orbs, scribbles, and textured elements of collage. While overtly physical, her paintings, often multi-paneled, are not lost to the oblivion of expression.
Snyder has always been outspoken, and her paintings are a kind of glorious outrage. When asked by Ruth Iskin, Lucy Lippard, and Arlene Raven to describe her art and its relationship to Feminism in 1977, she responded with an associative fusillade:
layers, words, membranes, cotton, cloth, rope, repetition, bodies, wet, opening, closing repetition, lists, life stories, grids, destroying grids, houses, intimacy, doorways, breasts, vaginas, flow, strong, building, putting together many disparaging elements, repetition, red, pink, black, earth feel colors, the sun, the moon…
The exhibition features a return to a common theme for Snyder, that of her “Field Series.” These works, painted in her studios in Woodstock and Brooklyn, continue to be about the sacred, the serene, fields of moons, moons in mud, rippling ponds, landscapes stretched out, and daily diaries exposed. These lush visions tell powerful stories.
Jason Andrew reviews Rachael Gorchov at Owen James Gallery
In a 1976 Cincinnati Enquirer review of Joan Snyder’s paintings, the reviewer, Owen Findsen, surmised that she had “picked up a little of this, a little of that … and made it all uglier.” While he found her work offensive, even questioning it’s validity, for those like me who have come to love Snyder’s work, it couldn’t be a bigger compliment. Joan Snyder paints her world from the inside out.
Contributed by Jason Andrew
There is a long history of artists expanding the objectness – that is, the sculptural dimension – of painting. Picasso and Braque introduced this concept in their assemblage works; Vladimir Tatlin broadened it in his “counter-reliefs” alongside Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoventhe, the “Dada Baroness”. For the Dadaists, breaking the picture plane meant breaking tradition, embracing chaos, and rejecting logic.
Decades later, as hardcore ideologies dissipated, Robert Rauschenberg, Bruce Conner, Elizabeth Murray, and many others explored the plasticity of painting in more playful and less doctrinaire ways. In her recent work, Rachael Gorchov revisits old ideologies but with an eye to establishing a new framework for painting. Gorchov is clearly interested in the traditional concerns of color, gesture, and pictorial space. And much like her cousin twice removed, the painter Ron Gorchov – whom she only met in adulthood – Rachael has developed a distinct structure for her work.
Although she was already working in ceramic around 2010, I first encountered her concave paintings (made through a combination of mixed-media including papier-mâché and clay) in a solo show she called “Convex Chromascope” at Hunter College in 2015. Her 2017 solo at Owen James (then in Greenpoint) represented a turning point in her work, as brushstroke and shape coalesced into a uniquely warped mise en scène.
Gorchov has incorporated vinyl printing (high-quality scans of paintings on paper) into her compositions. Mimicking a drop shadow as it cascades from a physical sculpture, the vinyl extends the work’s visual space and drama, confirming its strictly physical flatness while introducing the illusion of motion – just as the sun passing overhead designates time. Jennifer Bartlett’s paintings of the late 1980s incorporated sculptural elements that similarly extended their narrative. Although Gorchov’s work is much smaller in scale, her strategy is just as ambitious as Bartlett’s. And much like Bartlett’s sculptural features, Gorchov’s vinyl is a sardonic reminder of modern painting’s literalness.
Gorchov’s recent exhibition at Owen James Gallery (now located on Wooster Street in Soho), opened on the cusp of the COVID-19 outbreak, and I saw the show just days before it closed in early August. It featured nine wall-mounted works and two works installed on the floor. Gorchov now describes her work as “sculptural painting.”
DIY art spaces pop up in unexpected spots across the country
Cutting edge art isn’t limited to big cities and large cultural institutions. Creative work can be found across the country in small towns and artist-run spaces, says Jason Andrew, who curated an exhibit on contemporary Appalachian art that just opened at the new Asheville Art Museum in North Carolina, ashevilleart.org. “These are really DIY, do-it-yourself type spaces. You’re right there where all the creative juices are working and flowing.” He shares some favorite spots with Larry Bleiberg for USA Today
Cutting edge art isn’t limited to big cities and large cultural institutions. Creative work can be found across the country in small towns and artist-run spaces, says Jason Andrew, who curated an exhibit on contemporary Appalachian art that just opened at the new Asheville Art Museum in North Carolina, ashevilleart.org. “These are really DIY, do-it-yourself type spaces. You’re right there where all the creative juices are working and flowing.” He shares some favorite spots with Larry Bleiberg for USA TODAY.
Granary Arts, Ephraim, Utah
Art flourishes in remote central Utah thanks to artists based in a historic granary building on the high plains. “It’s in a very exciting space. It’s really in the desert. There’s nothing there,” says Andrew, a Utah native. Founded by two friends, it enriches the community with workshops, musical performances and art installations.
Popps Packing, Hamtramck, Michigan
This group founded by a husband and wife, has brought international artists and quirky shows and events to a neighborhood just north of Detroit. Housed in a former meat-packing plant, it serves a community with immigrants from places like Yemen, Armenia, Turkey and Ukraine, offering a tool-lending library and meeting spaces, along with gallery openings and shows.
Fiendish Plots, Lincoln, Nebraska
From Buddhist paintings made from rose petals to art inspired by workplace immigration raids, this gallery and exhibition space embraces the ephemeral and the contemporary. Run by an artist couple, it also offers workshops, performances, screenings, readings and artist talks.
Collar Works, Troy, New York
Artists have brought new life to a former industrial building in upstate New York. The collective, named for the city’s once-prominent shirt collar factories, got its start mounting pop-ups and shows in empty industrial spaces. It has helped lead the revival of the area, Andrew says, hosting often edgy art installations and theater productions.
Marmot Art Space, Spokane, Washington
Located in the hip Kendall Yards neighborhood, this “white cube” gallery focuses on emerging local artists, but has a polished vibe, Andrew says. It attracts crowds on the first Friday of every month when it opens new exhibits. “The walls are well painted, the lighting will be perfect. It’s a little more sophisticated.”
#AppalachiaNow curated by Jason Andrew opens the newly renovated Asheville Art Museum
Jason Andrew organizes Appalachia Now! An Interdisciplinary Survey of Contemporary Art in Southern Appalachia the inaugural exhibition of the newly renovated Asheville Art Museum.
Installation View: Andrew Scott Ross, Gallery of the Thieves, 2019, Acrylic paint, charcoal, mud, paper, and wood. Photo: Andrew Scott Ross
Curated by guest curator Jason Andrew, Appalachia Now! An Interdisciplinary Survey of Contemporary Art in Southern Appalachia is the inaugural exhibition of the newly renovated Asheville Art Museum. The exhibition provides a regional snapshot of the art of our time—a collective survey of contemporary Southern Appalachian culture.
This exhibition explores the amalgamation of tradition and present-day perspectives extant in contemporary artistic representations of life in this region. Appalachia Now! situates artists within a regional and national dialogue that spans time and socio-economic status. Whether works are bio-bibliographical, or address larger, universal themes, this cross-disciplinary exhibition invites visitors to participate in the individual experiences that make this part of the world so unique. It will celebrate contemporary artists living and working in Southern Appalachia, focusing on Asheville as a nucleus of creativity within the broader area of its adjacent states of Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.
Formerly isolated by geography, and sometimes intentionally so, Appalachia remains culturally rich and yet is more globally connected than ever before. Whereas past community and cultural exchanges took place through face-to-face, physical interaction, it is now possible to connect and access the world digitally. What was once a day’s journey from one town to the next has been replaced by the swipe and tap of a mobile phone. The diversity and magnitude of art-making in the region expands our understanding of the world today from the perspective of Southern Appalachia. Appalachia, while its roots are deep, has outlived its regionalism and is deserving of a new nuance of narrative. — Jason Andrew, curator
Appalachia Now! builds upon the Museum’s mission of collecting and interpreting 20th- and 21st-century American art in all media relevant to/produced in the Southeast and WNC. Inclusive and ambitious in scope, the exhibition will present a survey of works by emerging and established artists selected by Jason Andrew, a curator and juror of national renown. Andrew and Curatorial Assistant Lola Clairmont drove over 40 hours around the Southeast and made 54 studio visits with artists. In order to promote underrecognized and emerging artists, Appalachia Now! will feature artists whose work is not yet represented in the Museum’s Collection.
I am excited to share the many stylistic approaches and concerns of artists in this exhibition—their ages varied, their origins diverse. — Jason Andrew, curator
The following 50 artists have been selected through recommendations from regional museums, curators, and art organizations and through an open submission process. The overwhelming regional interest in this exhibition was demonstrated in the participation of artists in the free, public open call; over 400 artists applied through the call. Overall, the Museum and Andrew researched over 700 artists for consideration in the exhibition. The selected artists represent all media, including painting, sculpture, new media, dance, and film.
RELATED PRESS:
ARTSY.
Amy Beth Wright. “Artists of Appalachia Push Back on Regional Stereotypes.” Nov 22, 2019
Metropolis.
Joanne O’Sullivan. “Appalachia Makers Tell Their Own Story in New Exhibition.” Nov 22, 2019
HiFructose.
Andy Smith. “Asheville Art Museum Opens New Building in North Carolina.” Nov 18, 2019
Citizen Times.
Paul Moon. “Asheville Art Museum reopening highlights Madison County’s past, present and future.” Nov 12, 2019
Mountain Xpress.
Arnold Wengrow. “Asheville Art Museum readies for its grand reopening.” Oct 11, 2019
American Craft (Dec-Jan 2020)
”Appalachia Now! An Interdisciplinary Survey of Contemporary Art in Southern Appalachia.”
And these spotlights:
WMYA TV40.
John Le. “Man who one guarded Asheville Art Museum now has a piece on display there.” Nov 18, 2019
The Museum would like to thank the donors that make this exhibition possible: the John & Robyn Horn Foundation, The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina, Parsec Financial, The Chaddick Foundation, the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Hollis Taggart, the Maurer Family Foundation, and the Judy Appleton Memorial Fund. This project is also supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Museum would like to extend a special thanks to local partners Blue Ridge Printing, Asheville Color & Imaging, Mountain Paint & Decorating, and The Old Wood Co.
The Museum also thanks the following individuals for their support of this project: Jason Andrew, Chris Brooks, Lola Clairmont, Jenine Culligan, Emma-Leigh Evors, Beccy Hamm, Chesnee Klein, Nandini Makrandi, Jolene Mechanic, Amy G. Moorefield, Susan Rhew, and Stephen C. Wicks.
Your support helps the Asheville Art Museum develop community-driven programming and exhibitions. To contribute to Appalachia Now!, please visit our Donations page, select Upcoming Exhibitions, and type “Appalachia Now” in the Notes.
Announcing the formation of Artist Estate Studio, LLC
After many years of working independently as a consultant and estate representative, Jason Andrew has combined forces with his long time artistic collaborator of 25 years, Julia K. Gleich to form a new entity serving artists and estates of artists.
Based in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn, this newly formed team will consult and represent artists and estates of artists to further their careers and their legacies.