Obituary: Mimi Chen Ting (1946-2022)

Mimi Chen Ting (1946-2022), a Chinese-American painter, printmaker, and performance artist whose high-spirited practice fused Eastern and Western aesthetics, has died on March 6. The cause was complications due to a long battle with cancer.

She was 75 and was active in the artist communities of the Bay Area of San Francisco, CA, and Taos, NM.

An intense, unpretentious woman with a soft voice and fierce spirit, Ms. Ting was born in Shanghai, China, at the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War and during the communist takeover of the mainland. As a teenager her father swept floors for the industrialists Song Brothers to support his own family. By the time of Ms. Ting’s birth, he had worked his way up to Bank manager. Her mother was a concubine introduced to her father—16 years her senior when she was just 13. Raised in what Ms. Ting considered feudalistic China, she grew up in a compound with a shared courtyard where she played with other children and waited for the rice popper man to pass by. Memories of her maternal grandmother’s bound feet made a lasting impression–the imagery of which entered into many of her early figurative paintings.

As Ms. Ting’s father rose through the ranks of the banking industry, he relocated the family to Hong Kong. There Ms. Ting spent her childhood attending a convent school, where she was regularly charged by the nuns to make festive cards and headed the annual Christmas decorating. As she began to excel in ballet, her mother withdrew her from studying for fear that she would become “too muscular.” Ms. Ting rebelled, defiantly refusing to attend her piano lessons. This introduction to dance made a lasting impression, later informing her foray into contemporary performance art.

In middle school, she studied calligraphy. “Everybody had to take calligraphy,” she said. “I never really understood it until I was much older.” Attending Buddhist temples with her grandmother exposed her to rich colors, ancient wisdom, and reliquary forms, and trips with her father to see the Beijing Opera introduced her to theatrical costumes and dramatic movements. These events constituted her early influences, “without really realizing that’s what it was.”

In 1965, and with the contingency that she enroll in an all-girl’s Catholic school, Ms. Ting left Hong Kong for San Francisco to attend the San Francisco College of Women (now part of the University of San Francisco). There she pursued dual degrees in sociology and English literature. Though conditioned to perceive art as an indulgence, she signed up for an extra class every semester to do art. “It made me so happy to do it, to draw and paint.

Realizing that “being a social worker was very different from just having good intentions,” Ms. Ting  switched her major during her third year at college to art and transferred to California State University in San Jose (now known as San Jose State University). There, she was introduced to the art of Giotto and Piero Della Francesca. “I liked the simplified forms, the flatness against each other. The dynamics between the forms,” she reflected. 

At San Jose State, one instructor, Eric Oback, made a powerful impression on Ms. Ting. He urged her to find her own way of painting, and most importantly to “let the how follow the what.”

During these years, and being so close to Berkeley, Ms. Ting participated in the free speech movement, countless Vietnam protests, and attended the last rally for Robert Kennedy before his assassination in 1968. She supported herself working at a liquor store and as a hostess at a local restaurant. Ms. Ting received her BA in Art from San Jose State University in 1969, and she immediately began pursuing a graduate degree, 

This was a challenging time for Ms.Ting as she tried to strike the balance between her personal and professional life. Shortly after graduating, she married her college boyfriend,Andrew Ting in 1969. Their first child, Cheryl, was born in 1970, and their second child, Clarence, was born in 1972.

As she found her footing as a wife and mother, Ms. Ting remained dogged in pursuit of her art. Her first solo exhibition took place at Lucien Labaudt Gallery in San Francisco in 1970. The show consisted of paintings on paper, some made while “working in the corner of my bedroom lined with newspaper, while my infant daughter slept and played among pillows in our bed,” she recalled. The work on view was inspired by a trip to the Grand Canyon, where she harnessed the shapes and the sense of land, “but the palette was all my own.” This debut earned her an encouraging review by senior art critic Thomas Albright in the San Francisco Chronicle. Landscape, and moreover, the psychological connection to it, would forever be a recurring theme in her work. 

Like many women of her generation, gaining a footing in the gallery scene was a constant struggle. She told the story of approaching Smith-Andersen Gallery in Palo Alto early in her career, to show her work. “That was where Sam Francis was showing and I thought I’d really like to show with him. I didn't know there were several ways to approach a gallery,” she recalled. “I remember having my baby on one hip, a piece of work in my other arm and a copy of my review in hand as I walked into the gallery. I just walked in thinking, ‘Oh well, they'll be so impressed.’” They told her to come back in a few years; she did.

“Unfinished Woman,” 1986, Acrylic on canvas, 57 x 41 in (144.8 x 1045 cm)

“Devotion,” 2021, Acrylic on canvas, 53 x 48 in (134.6 x 122 cm)

In the years that followed, balancing her responsibilities as a mother, Ms. Ting maintained time in the studio becoming an accomplished printmaker. She completed her MA in painting in 1976 and began teaching drawing and design at the college level.

As her children were of an age where their needs made it difficult to find time for focused studio work, she returned to the study of dance—gravitating to modern techniques but embracing the pace and philosophy of Butoh. Ms. Ting explored performance work integrating both static and kinetic elements. In 1981, Ms. Ting became one of four founding members of a modern dance company often performing in abandoned sites across the Bay Area. “I love the kinesthetic,” she said, “I love feeling movement through my body. And I find that a very natural form of expression for me.” Ms. Ting’s paintings from his period are primarily figurative, often biographical in their referencing of ancestral identity within a gestural-dreamlike space.  

Beginning what she called her “second migratory arc,” in 1988, Ms. Ting impulsively purchased a one-room house on the mesa in Taos, New Mexico. The desire to see the Santa Fe Opera was the initial impetus for the visit to New Mexico. Initially conceived as a private retreat, Taos evolved into a major workspace for expanded stays. There, she found continuous inspiration from the ever-changing vistas, uncompromising grandeur, and spectacular weather patterns of the high desert. These forces and images are invoked in her work through her choice of palette, heightened contrasts, and sinuous contours. It was during one of her drives back from Taos that she would take a four-day movement workshop from the legendary choreographer and dancer Anna Halprin. Sherwood Chen and Hiroko Tamano were other dance artists with whom Ms. Ting had studied. Movement, much like her approach to painting, was an embrace of the ephemeral. “Always a response to the moment,” she said.

From 2000, Ms. Ting divided her time between the studio in Taos and Marin County. The Bay Area provided a connection to family—including her children and grandchildren in Oakland—and a travel base from which she could fly to Hong Kong to visit her mother, which she did twice a year until her passing.

While her career is book-ended by an interest in the expressive possibilities of abstraction, Ms. Ting’s paintings from the 1980s, 90s and early aughts focused primarily on figurative work that explored notions of womanhood, immigration, and a somatic relationship between landscape and place. Embracing the processes of Abstract Expressionism as well as the Buddhist practice of the beginner’s mind, Ms. Ting regularly approached her canvases without any preconceived ideas, preferring to allow the direct application of paint and the subconscious gesture to dictate her compositions. She often worked thematically and in series. 

“I am like an irrepressible child, capable of boundless possibilities, when I enter my studio. I thrill at the process of making marks and I relish the meandering that my medium proffers,” she said.

"The work of Mimi Chen Ting melds art and life like no other artist I know,” explains curator Jason Andrew, who had the honor of working with Ms. Tiing over the course of her final year, “Though working strictly within an abstract vein, I see a keen and perceptive understanding of beauty and its translation through a very personal and emotional language. There is so much more to see and learn through her art and performances."

Ms. Ting held teaching positions at San Jose Metropolitan Adult Education, San Jose State University, San Jose City College, University of California at Berkeley Extension, and more recently at Taos Institute of Art. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 2003 for her performance “How to Make a Book and Eat It Too” at the Millicent Rogers Museum, Taos, NM. In 2012, she was awarded the Agnes Martin Award for Abstract Painting and Drawing from Fall Arts, based in Taos, in 2012.

Her work can be found in public collections including the Harwood Art Museum, Taos.

Aside from being a noted artist, Ms. Ting was a self-described “opera, NPR and chamber music addict.” She loved gardening and science fiction, practiced yoga and tai chi, and thought hard about the world’s most pressing geopolitical and environmental concerns. She is survived by her husband, two children, and four grandchildren.

“There are no fixed horizons,” Ms. Ting said, and so her spirit lives on through her art.

News: CITYarts SoHo Artists History Walk Online Exhibition

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CITYarts is proud to present the first iteration of exhibitions in this online format for our project SoHo Artists History Walk. Celebrating the works of nearly 100 of the artists whose careers have helped to define New York's SoHo neighborhood and community.

FEATURING WORKS BY

Stephen Antonakos | Arnaud | Leigh Behnke | Zigi Ben-haim | Siri Berg | Richard Bosman | Nancy Brett | Nancy Burson | Myrel Chernick | Christo |maxi Cohen | David W. Cummings | Jennifer Clifford Danner | Claudia Demonte | Agnes Denes | Michele Oka Doner | Cynthia Eardly | Don Eddy | Martha Edelheit | Tom Evans | Sandi Fellman | Jackie Ferrara | Susan Firestone | Cris Gianakos | Kathleen Gilje | Max Gimblett | Andrew Ginzel | Michael Gitlin | Richard Haas | Marcia Hafif | Mary Jane Hanja | Julie Harrison | Julian Hatton | Judith Henry | Stuart Hitch | Barry Holden | Erick Johnson | Donald Judd | Barbara Knight | Joyce Kozloff | Shigeko Kubota | Diana Kurz | Don Lewallen | Mon Levinson | Vered Lieb | Louis Lieberman | Robert Lobe | Vincent Longo | Beatice Mady | Lenore Malen | Charles Marburg | Margo Margolis | Jan Meisnner | Louis Mendez | Renee Monrose | Judith Murray | Wendy Nadler | Richard Nonas | Charles Thomas O'neil | Nam Jun Paik | Peter Pinchbeck | Lucio Pozzi | Dina Recanati | Peter Reginato | Deborah Remington | Rodney Ripps | Tony Robbin | Erika Rothenberg | Sumayyah Samaha | Andra Samelson | Claude Samton | Linda Schrank | Michal Shapiro | Cindy Sherman | Arlene Slavin | Sandi Slone | Katherine Sokolnikof | Michelle Stuart | Susanna Tanger | Alan Wexler | Daniel Wiener | Hannah Wilke | Thornton Willis | Susan Wittenberg | Nina Yankowitz | Robert Yasuda | Jerilea Zempel

VIEW THE EXHIBITION

Prior to becoming SoHo (an acronym for South of Houston Street), the area was a light manufacturing zone occupied by sweatshops in buildings that are now National Historic Landmarks. Deserted in the evenings and on the weekends, these buildings opened onto dark and beaten-up streets with no green spaces or community services. It wasn't until the late '60s when these buildings were taken over by “some crazy artists” who had the vision to turn them into live/work loft spaces that SoHo became the cultural model for the world. More information, along with a more comprehensive list of SoHo artists can be found on the main project webpage.

Yet, in spite of this phenomenal success & maybe because of it, many politicians are considering destroying it through up-zoning to allow for the construction of high-rise buildings that will put the historical uniqueness of this neighborhood in the shadows and shatter its spirit.

My co-curator, Lesley Heller, and exhibition advisors Joyce Pomeroy-Schwartz and Charlotta Kotik, want to raise awareness about the power of art to impact people’s lives as almost nothing else can.

CITYarts is actively reaching out to the New Mayor of NYC Eric Adams & Manhattan Borough President Marc Levine to come meet the artists of SoHo, have a conversation, and work towards understanding why we should contribute to preserving this unique neighborhood as a jewel in the crown of NYC, not destroying it!

Enjoy the exhibition. Purchase the works that you like. Artists will receive 50% of the proceeds & CITYarts 50% to support our projects. A portion of CITYarts proceeds will be allocated to promoting the work of incarcerated American Indian artist Leonard Peltier in recognition of Human Rights week.

Twentieth-Century Woman: A pioneer of New York’s loft scene gets a long-overdue introduction.

by Jamie Hood

Early in her book The Loft Generation, the artist and critic Edith Schloss recalls the painting that changed her life. Schloss — a recent German-Jewish émigré to the United States — was at a party in a New Jersey farmhouse in the early 1940s when she came upon it: “It was green and gray and black. In it leaned a curvilinear shape like a number eight, or two sliced 0s, egg-like shapes snugly fitting. There was something still and clear about the little thing … I’d never seen anything like it.”

The artist Fairfield Porter found Schloss there, entranced, and offered to introduce her to the artist behind the painting. Back in New York, he led her to a loft on 22nd Street: “When the door was finally opened, the man who stood there looked aghast at Fairfield and me,” she writes, “But then he caught himself, and with quick, cheerful politeness asked us inside.” Schloss was a disappointment, a mere art student. The then little-known Bill De Kooning was the man inside the studio; he’d expected Porter to summon a power-player, someone to rally around his blossoming career. But it was Schloss who got there first.

You’ve likely never heard of Edith Schloss. Although the New York Sun identified her as “an artist best known for knowing everyone who counted in Manhattan’s legendary postwar art scene,” she has been largely exiled from popular memory, without even a Wikipedia page. But Schloss, who died in Rome in 2011, once lived and worked in the center of the center of midcentury New York’s most illustrious culturati. The Loft Generation: From the De Koonings to Twombly is a patchwork tapestry of on-the-scene recollections of a radically transformative era for American (particularly New York) art and culture.

Art World: Whitehot Magazine with Noah Becker

Noah talks with Jason Andrew, an independent curator and producer, archivist and writer. He the founding partner at Artist Estate Studio, which manages the Estate of Elizabeth Murray among others. He first met Elizabeth Murray when she invited him to her studio for advice on organizing her studio archives. A decade later, he was asked to manage her Estate. Through research-heavy Instagram posts, edgy exhibitions, and provoking essays like how graffiti influenced Elizabeth Murray, he has re-introduced the artist to a new generation of artists, curators, and collectors. A prominent figure in the emerging Brooklyn art scene, he is the co-founder of Norte Maar whose mission is to promote collaborations among the visual, literary, and performing arts.

New York Was Very Heaven

By Andy Grundberg

The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly: Portraits and Sketches, 1942–2011 by Edith Schloss; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pp., $32

The Loft Generation has several things to recommend it: an inspired title (that’s “Loft,” not “Lost”); a cast of characters essential to postwar American art (not only the de Koonings and Cy Twombly but also Fairfield Porter, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Jack Tworkov, Larry Rivers, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Harold Rosenberg, among others); a female author who knew them well and whose presence on the scene has been largely forgotten, along with her contributions to it; and finally, a gripping story about a group of young artists, many of them immigrants like Schloss, who reshaped contemporary art and in the process made New York the center of the art world.

New York’s Midcentury Art Scene Springs to Life in ‘The Loft Generation’

By Alexandra Jacobs

Many prophesied the demise of New York City during the Great and Temporary Exodus of 2020. But none had quite the dramatic vision of Jack Tworkov, the abstract expressionist painter, in the middle of the previous century. “Imagine a great catastrophe. And all this mowed down,” he mused then, looking at photographs of buildings, envisioning rust and dust. “And tourists wandering around in all that emptiness — where was the Flatiron, the Empire State — looking for past grandeur. Imagine good old New York someday just like Egypt.”

Tworkov is one of scores who come bearing aperçus in the German American writer and artist Edith Schloss’s memoir, “The Loft Generation,” discovered in rough-draft form after her death in 2011. It’s been polished into a glowing jewel of a book by several editors including Mary Venturini, who worked with her in later years at a magazine for expats in Rome, and Schloss’s son, Jacob Burckhardt.

New Publication: The Loft Generation

A bristling and brilliant memoir of the mid-twentieth-century New York School of painters and their times by the renowned artist and critic Edith Schloss, who, from the early years, was a member of the group that shifted the center of the art world from Paris to New York

The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly is a firsthand account by an artist at the center of a landmark era in American art. Edith Schloss writes about the artists, poets, and musicians who were part of the postwar art movements in America and about her life as an artist in America and later in Italy, where she continued to paint and write until her death in 2011.

Schloss was born in Germany and moved to New York City during World War II. She became part of a thriving community of artists and intellectuals, from Elaine and Willem de Kooning and Larry Rivers to John Cage and Frank O’Hara. She married the photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt. She was both a working artist and an incisive art critic, and was a candid and gimlet-eyed observer of the close-knit community that was redefining American art. In later life she lived in Italy and spent time with artists such as Giorgio Morandi, Cy Twombly, Meret Oppenheim, and Francesca Woodman.

In The Loft Generation, Schloss creates a rare and irreplaceable up-close record of an era of artistic innovation and the colorful characters who made it happen. There is no other book like it. Her firsthand information is indispensable reading for all critics and researchers of that vital period in American art.

Reviews

“Schloss brilliantly conveys her experiences . . . Thoughtfully edited by Venturini, [The Loft Generation] combines Schloss’s personal memoir with her art criticism to provide a riveting firsthand account of the daily lives, complex social interactions, and marital spats of artists . . . Rich in granular detail and rendered in eloquent and captivating prose, this is an intimate look at a pivotal era in its formative stages and offers an invaluable source for the study of one of the great art movements.”

—Publishers Weekly

"Shrewdly observant, Schloss conveys in painterly prose the spirited individuals whose lives she shared and the worlds they inhabited . . . A captivating memoir of a life in art."

—Kirkus Reviews

“Zestily precise and deeply knowledgeable . . . With preternatural recall, a discerning eye, keen ear, and hard-won insights, Schloss shares spirited, funny, wry and poignant tales . . . Intrepid, attentive, judicious, and radiantly expressive, Schloss presents an exhilarating perspective on a salient chapter in art history.”

—Donna Seaman, Booklist

"I am tempted to say Edith Schloss’s Loft Generation is remarkable, but remarkable seems inadequate to describe it. Schloss’s memoir of life in New York during the heyday of the Abstract Expressionist movement and her subsequent expat years in Italy is wise, witty, and wild in equal measures. Writing from the position of the ultimate insider about a world that we are only beginning to understand and fully appreciate, she introduces readers to the artists and writers and composers who became part of her life – Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Rudy Burckhardt, Edwin Denby, Paul and Jane Bowles, John Cage, Frank O’Hara, among many, many others. And she describes the romance that is the life of the artist, despite poverty, monstrous political and social turmoil, and changing artistic fortunes. By the end of her story, which is so intimate and so true, we are left feeling as though we are part of that world, too. Quite simply, Schloss transports us, and that is the most any writer can hope to do. No, remarkable does not begin to describe her memoir. The Loft Generation is superb."

—Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women, Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art

“This indispensable eyewitnessing of a crucial period in American culture is wonderfully alive, entertaining, and beautifully written, with a dazzling mix of the personal and the aesthetic. Warmly honest, perceptive, and humane, Edith Schloss’s memoir is itself a work of art.”

—Phillip Lopate, author of The Art of the Personal Essay

Exhibition News: Elizabeth Murray at Gladstone Galley

Elizabeth Murray
October 30 – December 23, 2021
515 West 24th Street

Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition with the Estate of Elizabeth Murray after announcing representation in the summer of 2020. This show presents a selection of the artist’s monumental canvases that helped define her career and singular place in art history.

I was in Elizabeth Murray's painting class at The School of Visual Art in New York City in the mid-70s... Elizabeth was exactly the mentor we sought, someone who by dint of both gender and disposition occupied an inside and outside position... Murray simply refused to submit to the position of illegitimacy that females experience in painting history. She just broke on in, seemingly taking what she needed from painting, and moving forward with it, like a shoplifter, or someone from inside the Trojan Horse.

— Amy Sillman on Elizabeth Murray in Texte Zur Kunst, 2021

Murray was born in Chicago in 1940 and had an early interest in making and studying art. While attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she was deeply influenced by the work of Paul Cézanne, which inspired her to pursue a degree in painting. Following her education, Murray moved to New York, where she developed a unique approach to artmaking and honed her intuitive ability to masterfully combine shapes and colors in both two- and three-dimensional realms. With a fascination for the plastic qualities of paint, she spent the decade of the 1960s experimenting with soft sculpture. Her compositions from the 1970s, in which rhythmic symbols play across thickly-layered rectangular planes of color, demonstrate Murray’s astuteness at crafting and understanding form, and highlight the artist’s hand during a period when Minimalism was the predominant movement in New York’s art scene. Her radical and trailblazing approach to art making evolved with the introduction of massive sized, multi-panel works in relief configurations. These complex canvases, which began in the early 1980s and continued until her death in 2007, challenged the very definition of painting. When her spirals and pregnant commas began to suggest recognizable forms—cups, tables, chairs—the narrative of the work was labeled "domestic." To this she replied, “Cézanne painted cups and saucers and apples, and no one assumed he spent a lot of time in the kitchen.”

With a pioneering practice that has bridged Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism, Murray was instrumental in reawakening the power of painting, and her expansive body of work continues to influence and inspire artists, writers, and curators in long-lasting, profound ways.

Murray’s work has been the subject of major exhibitions around the world since her New York City debut in the 1972 Annual Exhibition, “Contemporary American Painting” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Solo exhibition highlights include: Camden Arts Centre, Camden, UK (2019); Anderson Collection at Stanford University, CA (2018); Musée d’art modern et contemporaine, Geneva (2016); BAM, Brooklyn, NY (2016); Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, CA (2014); Arts Club of Chicago (2009); University Art Gallery, Staller Center for the Arts, Stony Brook University, NY (2008); Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS (1993); Newark Museum, NJ (1992); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (1991); and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (1988). In 1987, a mid-career retrospective, “Elizabeth Murray: Paintings and Drawings,” organized by Sue Graze and Kathy Halbriech, originated at the Dallas Museum of Art, and later traveled to the Albert and Vera List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Cambridge and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2005, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, opened a career retrospective, which traveled to Intitut Valencia d’Art Modern, Valencia Spain. Murray was recently the subject of two major museum exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, “Wild Life: Elizabeth Murray & Jessi Reaves,” curated by Rebecca Matalon, which is currently on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art through January 9, 2022, and the University at Buffalo Art Galleries, “Elizabeth Murray: Back in Town,” curated by Robert Scalise.

Mimi Chen Ting: announcing new website

Since the late 1960s, Ting has harnessed the inspiration of “sky,” “land,” and the balance of ever changing physical and spiritual “unfixed” horizons in her work spanning six decades. A prominent figure in the artist communities of Taos, New Mexico, and Sausalito, California, she has exhibited extensively including recent solo presentations at Vedder Price, San Francisco (’18) and historic group exhibitions including Work by Women: Postwar Dialogues at the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos (’18).

Born in Shanghai, China, at the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Mimi Chen Ting spent her childhood and teenage years in Hong Kong. In 1965, she moved to San Francisco, California, to pursue dual degrees in Sociology and English Literature at the San Francisco College of Women (now part of the University of San Francisco). After her third year at college—and a year of social field work—Mimi realigned her life in the pursuit of art and performance. She graduated from California State University, San Jose, with a BA in Art in 1969 and later received her MA in painting in 1976 from the same institution. In 2003 she received an NEA Grant for the performance How to Make a Book and Eat It Too at the Millicent Rogers Museum, Taos, NM. Recent awards and honors include the 2012 Agnes Martin Award for Abstract Painting and Drawing from the Peter And Madeline Martin Foundation for The Creative Arts.

This new website features an artist-curated selection of images of signature works from the now five-decade career of Mimi Chen Ting, including extensive biographical information, exhibition and performance history, and bibliography.

"Ting melds art and life like no other artist I know. Though working strictly within an abstract vein, I see a keen and perceptive understanding of beauty and its translation through a very personal and emotional language. There is so much more to see and learn through her art and performances."

— Jason Andrew
Founding Partner at Artist Estate Studio, LLC

Confetto 3, 2008

Acrylic on canvas, 25 X 25 in (63.5 x 63.5 cm)
Collection of the Harwood Museum, Taos, NM

Exhibition News

Chimayo Trading Del Norte presents:

Eleven:
featuring the work of Nicki Marx, Gretchen Ewert, Annell Livingston, Margaret Nes, Mimi Chen Ting, Sandra Lerner, Ann Huston, TJ Mabrey, Ginger Mongiello, Paula Verona, and Christine Taylor Patten

Chimayo Trading Del Norte
#1 St. Francis Church Plaza
Ranchos de Taos, NM

Virtual Exhibition: Five Drawings opens for Janice Biala

Even at the height of her most gestural abstractions, Biala (1903-2000) held tight to traditional subject matter that inspired her—still lifes, interiors, landscapes, and portraiture. These subjects, rooted in old Europe, remained true for Biala throughout her career. Recently a portfolio of drawings was catalogued by the estate. Made available here for the first time in this online gallery curated by Jason Andrew, Curator/Director of the Estate of Janice Biala.

This selection features five large drawings by Biala depicting the interiors of her home at 8 rue Bertrand in Paris, France. These drawings, dating from 1965 to 1983, capture scenes within scenes, sometimes even combining two entirely different architectural points of view—a few even illustrate her own paintings in situ. They offer reference and perspective into Biala’s colorful and complex world—one that captures the sublime assimilation of the School of Paris and the New York School of abstract expressionism.

These are no easy interiors… her mark and gesture move them from the mere domestic to the dramatic.

— Jason Andrew

Virtual Event | Joan Witek: an online talk, Thursday July 8

Online Talk, Thursday, July 8
7 PM UK / 8 PM CET / 2 PM NYC

Please join us online for a talk with SKK founder and collector Carl-Jürgen Schroth and Bartha Contemporary director Niklas von Bartha, exploring Joan Witek's current exhibition at the Museum Wilhelm Morgner in Soest, Germany. Jason Andrew, friend and manager of Witek's studio will introduce her ouevre.

The exhibition, organized by Stiftung Konzeptuelle Kunst, continues until Sunday, July 18.

Schedule:

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20:00* Welcome by Carl-Jürgen Schroth
Collector and founder of Stiftung Konzeptuelle Kunst, Soest

20:10* Introduction:Joan Witek by Jason Andrew
Artist Estate Studio LLC, NYC, manager of the Studio of Joan Witek

20:20* Curators Carl-Jürgen Schroth and Niklas von Bartha will discuss their continued involvement with Joan Witek's work and their longstanding friendship with the seminal artist

Questions by the public

20:45* End
* All times local (Soest)
UK 7-7.45 PM, NYC 2 - 2.45 PM

This event is free and held in English.

Joan Witek, P-161, 2013, Pencil and Oil stick on canvas, 45 x 73.5 in (114.3 x 186.7 cm)
© 2021 Joan Witek / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Siri Berg (1921-2020): announcing new website!

Artist Estate Studio, LLC is pleased to announce the launch of a new website for Siri Berg (1921-2020) created in collaboration with the artist's estate. The new site builds upon an extensive archive compiled by the artist as revisited by Artist Estate Studio, LLC.

Jason Andrew writes:

"I had the great opportunity of meeting Siri on the occasion of her historic survey at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center in 2016. Previous to this, I was aware of her now legendary obsession with color. In the great tradition of geometric abstraction, Siri's work is noted for its purity as color became her calling card. Color and texture gave way to personal stories told through an embracing of total abstraction. Inspired by the theories put forward by Johannes Itten and Josef Albers, Siri took hold of their statements turning out her own theories ranging from bold and fast-forward to subdued and slow in motion."

Siri Berg (1921-2020) "Shiftings (SBE0154)", 2010, Oil on canvas (five parts), 30 x 107.5 in (overall) (76.2 x 273.1 cm) Collection of the Estate of Siri Berg

Siri Berg (1921-2020) "Gradation (Blues) (SBE1449–1457)", 2010, Oil on canvas (nine parts), 20 x 90 in (overall) (50.8 x 228.6 cm), Collection of the Estate of Siri Berg

Work in Focus

"Kabbalah," 1985
Acrylic on canvas
72 x 72 in (182.9 x 182.9 cm)
SBE0479-11

Learn more about the intention behind the making this work here.

Book Store

In addition to a well-researched bibliography, several catalogs are newly available for purchase from various exhibition held of Siri Berg's work that include essays by William Zimmer, Gerald Haggerty, and Dominique Nahas.

Studio of Siri Berg, Mercer Street, SoHo, 2021. Photo: Ray Foley

Photo Essay: The Studio of Siri Berg by Ray Foley

On March 13, 2021, the Estate of Siri Berg in association with Artist Estate Studio, LLC hosted an open house at Siri Berg’s home and studio on Mercer Street in the heart of SoHo. The occasion celebrated the life and work of the artist and was attended my family, friends, and collectors and documented with this photo essay by Ray Foley.

Read more

Sarah Bednarek (1980-2019): announcing new website!

Artist Estate Studio, LLC is pleased to announce the launch of a new website for Sarah Bednarek (1980-2019) created in collaboration with the artist's estate. The new site builds upon the friendship between Artist Estate Studio co-founder Jason Andrew and the artist.

Jason Andrew writes:

"I first met Sarah in Bushwick sometime after her life threatening diagnosis in 2009. At the time, her work took a dramatic shift. Near death following emergency surgery, Sarah felt herself hurtling toward a light in a tunnel of kaleidoscopic, every-changing geometric forms. Under the influence of death and morphine, as she described it, she embraced the hallucinogenic experiences transforming these mystical visions into geometry and form. This convergence forced Bednarek to question her mind and space, her imagination versus reality. The result was sculptures that externalize the internal idea while showing the value of real objects created by human hand. It's an honor to volunteer my experience in promoting and preserving Sarah's legacy.”

Installation view: “Sarah Bednarek: ChiChi DooDad,” Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, NY, October 19-November 18, 2018. Courtesy TSA, Brooklyn

Installation view: “On Human Limits: Sarah Bednarek, James Bounché, Deric Carner, Peter Rostovsky,” Present Co., Brooklyn, NY, May 18-June 17, 2018. Courtesy Present Co.

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"I think I am funny sometimes. I mean, I did make a cactus sculpture that waves at you. Sometimes I make things that look like genitalia. I am kind of abashed that I make stuff like that, but I am trying not to judge. I also make things that have deceptive insides – you can look in, but what’s there isn’t what’s on the outside. Maybe that’s a prank."
— Sarah Bednarek interviewed by Etty Yaniv, 2018

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Artist Estate Studio found Sarah's original website which she coded and designed to be the single best tool by which to uphold the very idea by which Sarah wanted us to experience her work. Sarah’s original website is now archived here — embedded within a new website which will continue to advocate for her life and work. We have also provided a statement outlining our intent and purpose here. Additionally the new site includes up to date biographical information, exhibition history, and bibliography.

Self-Portrait by Sarah Bednarek Sculpture Fund

Before her untimely death, Sarah completed a self-portrait in clay. Jason Matuskiewicz, Sarah's partner, has established a gofundme to support the effort to realize this final work in a limited bronze edition.

GoFundMe ⭢

Call For Works by Sarah Bednarek

Artist Estate Studio in collaboration with the Estate of Sarah Bednarek is currently creating a systematic and comprehensive scholarly reference catalogue for all known works by the artist. This research will include drawings, paintings, and sculpture in an effort establish a reliable corpus of completed works.

Email images, title, alternative titles, date, medium, size, inscriptions, provenance (location), exhibition history, and publication history here.

Historic Survey Opens at UB Art Galleries

Elizabeth Murray: Back in Town

June 12-October 3, 2021

UB Anderson Gallery
1 Martha Jackson Place
Buffalo, NY

This summer the University at Buffalo Art Galleries presents the first major posthumous exhibition of work by pioneering painter Elizabeth Murray (1940–2007). This survey presents a fresh look at important themes and motifs of Murray’s five-decade career.

Elizabeth Murray: Back in Town plots the artist’s career chronologically through paintings, drawings, and prints, which reveal how the early, never-before-exhibited works she made while based in the San Francisco Bay area and later in Buffalo relate to the mature painting style that earned her critical acclaim.

The impact of the two years Murray spent in Buffalo working and teaching at Rosary Hill College (now Daemen) has previously been a footnote in her legendary career and was treated as a two-year stopover during her move from San Francisco to New York City. In Buffalo, as Murray acknowledged herself, her work “changed radically,” setting her on a path to become the bold painter known for her wildly shaped canvases—a mix of abstraction and cartoonish figuration. This survey marks 55 years since Murray’s solo exhibition at the Tomac Gallery, an artist-run gallery in Buffalo, which was in operation from 1965 to 1969.

AES Collaborates with Robert Moskowitz Studio to Design and Launch a New Website

Building on the friendship and the near 20 year relationship between co-founder Jason Andrew and the artist Robert Moskowitz, Artist Estate Studio, LLC, is pleased to announce the launch of a website for the artist’s studio. The website features signature works from the artist's now six decade career as well as extensive biographical information, exhibition history and bibliography.

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RobertMoskowitz.org →

Robert Moskowitz (b. 1935) has been described as a significant link between the Abstract Expressionists of the New York School and New Image painters of the 1970s.

“Bob’s style is consistent in conversations as it is in the work; a variety of reflective statements on his personal life; an internal balancing, the method of a sensitive man whose gift is to adapt statements specifically about himself in terms that relate to a larger means.” —Michael Hurson

Moskowitz first gained recognition exhibiting at the Leo Castelli Gallery in the early 1960s. His inclusion in the historic exhibition Art of The Assemblage at The Museum of Modern Art in 1961, signaled his arrival into the contemporary discourse of the time. His work was featured in New Image Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1978, where together with works by Jennifer Bartlett, Michael Hurson, Neil Jenney, and Susan Rothenberg, Moskowitz’s pared-down often silhouetted images marked a resurgence of figurative painting in the late 1970s.

Awards include John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (‘67), New York State Council on the Arts Grant (‘73), National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist’s Fellowship (‘75). Teaching positions include Maryland Insitute College of Art, Baltimore (‘64-’73), School of Visual Arts, New York (‘69-71), Yale Norfolk Summer School (‘67,’69). Visiting Artist appointments include Art Institute of Chicago (‘74), Ohio State University (‘75). In 2001, Moskowitz was Artist in Residence at the American Academy in Rome.

In 1989, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden mounted a major retrospective of the artist’s work, which traveled to the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 

Over the course of his six-decade career, Moskowitz has focused on a variety of images, from well-known art historical sources to more commonplace things like birds, icebergs, and buildings, all executed against stark, monochromatic backgrounds.  Using symbolism, metaphor, and repetition, the artist’s images offer arresting images of timelessness—a teetering balance between recognition and abstraction.

Virtual Event | What is Legacy Planning?

Our friends at the R.B. Kitaj Studio Project have invited us to join them in a discussion.

Join us Thurs, Feb 25 at 2:00 pm ET / 11:00 am PT

Organized & moderated by Tracy Bartley

Director of the R.B. Kitaj Studio Project

Panelists:

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*After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

Julia Schwartz

Director of Administration and Development
for the Artists' Legacy Foundation

Julia Schwartz facilitates the Foundation's awards and outreach programs. She works with nominators, jurors, and the Foundation's board to administer the Artist Award. She also manages educational programs including the Legacy Discussion Group, in which specialists give free lectures on organizing artwork, maintaining collections, and making long-term plans for creative legacies. The Foundation acts as a resource for artists interested in learning more about estate planning and archiving. Schwartz received a Bachelor of Science in design at UC Davis, and has worked as a consultant to artists and arts nonprofits since 2005.

Jason Andrew

Founding Partner of the Artist Estate Studio, LLC

Jason Andrew is an independent scholar, curator, and producer. Specializing in the field of Post War American Art, Mr. Andrew is the Curator/Manager of the Estate of Abstract Expressionist Jack Tworkov. Since this appointment in 2002, he has organized countless exhibitions and lectured extensively on the artist and his contemporaries including organizing the first retrospective of the artist’s work in New York City at the UBS Art Gallery in 2009. Mr. Andrew has published extensively on the artist and his contemporaries and is currently editing the catalogue raisonné of works by Jack Tworkov. In 2016, Andrew was made Head of the Estate of Elizabeth Murray.

Julia Gleich

Founding Partner of the Artist Estate Studio, LLC

Julia Gleich is a choreographer, teacher, scholar and mathematics aficionado with an MA from the Bolz Center for Arts Administration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2004, Ms. Gleich, in partnership with Jason Andrew, founded Norte Maar for Collaborative Projects in the Arts with a mission to renew and refresh the exchange within the interdisciplinary arts. Following on from this success, she has joined forces with Jason to become a partner in Artist Estate Studio, LLC.

Exhibition News: "Tworkov: Drawings from the 70s" opens at Minus Space

View fullsize

Jack Tworkov (1900-1982) Nine Sketches, 1975, Graphite and colored pencil on paper, 13 1/4 x 13 1/2 in (33.7 x 33.7 cm) [CR 186]
© 2021 Estate of Jack Tworkov / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Jack Tworkov: Drawings from the 70s

February 6-May 1, 2021

MINUS SPACE

16 Main Street, Suite A
Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.minusspace.com

Special COVID Hours: Saturdays, 11am-5pm + by appointment
DUMBO | corner of Main + Water
A or C to High Street | F to York Street | 2 or 3 to Clark Street

Brooklyn, NY — MINUS SPACE is honored to present the survey exhibition Jack Tworkov: Drawings from the 70s. Organized in collaboration with the Estate of Jack Tworkov, Van Doren Waxter the exhibition presents two dozen works on paper spanning the years 1970-1981, many of which are presented to the public for the very first time.

Renowned painter Jack Tworkov (1900-1982) was at the forefront of American modernism for seven decades. He forged a disciplined painting practice through ever-evolving methods, materials, and formats resulting in a singular artistic vision which continues to be avidly discussed and celebrated today. Starting in the mid to late-1960s, Tworkov’s earlier exuberant, gestural abstraction began to evolve into an increasingly reductive and analytical one. He started to organize his new paintings and accompanying drawings around the grid format and to utilize orthogonal lines, geometric shapes, and a limited color palette. Tworkov’s previously animated brushstrokes transformed into a kind of repeating hashmark that formed shimmering, transparent patterns.

Tworkov’s striking works on paper produced during the 1970s reveal and document the breadth of this experimentation during this critical transition in his late work. On view in the exhibition are a broad array of drawings from this period which range in approach from quick sketches for eventual paintings – sometimes with up to twelve separate studies ganged up a single page – to larger, highly-refined charcoal drawings on paper.

The artist utilized a noteworthy array of drafting materials in these works including graphite, pencil, colored pencil, and charcoal on a variety of supports, such as paper, translucent vellum, and graph paper. With these materials Tworkov explored a broad new visual vocabulary of radiating lines, checkered grids, shifting architectural planes, and translucent triangular and quadrilateral shapes, often dynamically depicted as if balanced on a single corner. Of particular note, the exhibition features ten works from his rigorous, rule-based Knight Series, which were informed by the various L-shaped movements a knight piece could potentially make across the checkered plane of a chessboard. The unpredictable, stepped lines added an inventive element resembling a constellation into the composition of his drawings.

The exhibition will also present one of Tworkov’s contemporaneous, large-format paintings entitled Q2-76 #1 (1976, oil on canvas, 80 x 80 inches), as well as the accompanying study on graph paper. A concurrent exhibition of the artist’s geometric paintings from this period entitled Tworkov: Towards Nirvana / Works from the 70s will also be on view at Van Doren Waxter, 23 E. 73rd Street, New York, NY, from January 14 – March 20, 2021. 

For further information about Jack Tworkov and available artworks, please contact the gallery. Available works can also be viewed on our new web site, as well as on our Artsy page: www.artsy.net/minus-space.

Jack Tworkov: Towards Nirvana / Works from the 70s

The eight paintings and seven drawings that comprise Towards Nirvana/ Works from the 70s all date from an important decade for Jack Tworkov (1900–1982). The 1970s saw a solo show at the Whitney Museum curated by Marcia Tucker (1971), the Skowhegan Medal for Painting (1974) (presented to the artist by artist and dealer Betty Parsons), and a career survey at the Third Eye Centre, Glasgow (1979) which toured the UK. Significantly, Tworkov had undertaken changes to his painting, moving away from the more obviously gestural spontaneity that marked his development in Abstract Expressionism in New York. Trial and error evolved into a meditative, analytical approach for which Tworkov also developed a new medium of oil pigment mixed with Lucite (a synthetic organic compound) thinned with turpentine. This method emphasized the quality, particularity, and viscosity of his brush mark—a mark he would eventually set over a mathematically calculated pencil grid. The mark as a discreet, repeated element remained a constant focus throughout Twrorkov’s long career.

Jack Tworkov, OP-Q2-77-3.5.8 Series, 1977. Oil on paper, 18 x 18 inches. Courtesy the Jack Tworkov Estate and Van Doren Waxter. © 2021 Estate of Jack Tworkov / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

In his essay, “On My Outlook as a Painter: A Memoir” (1974), originally published in Leonardo: International Journal of the Contemporary Artist, Tworkov spoke of a “ruling middle-class… [that] now preens itself as the patron and advocate of every outrage-as-innovation. It has coopted bohemia and captured its style and established it as typically bourgeois.” He continued, bemoaning “the vulgarization of life and politics for which the same class is to be held responsible.” The turn away from a devalued, expressionist abstraction towards an austere, conceptual, and rigorous painting, though no less sensual, reflected Tworkov’s observations on and experiences of the wider world—not simply his formal innovation.

Idling II (1970) is a vertical painting, with a black margin abutting the sides of a descending sequence of varying grey brush marks. The paint runs as the narrow brush marks are applied with an even rhythm. The paint weaves and interlaces unpredictably between control and accident—open within measure, a freedom within chosen restraints. There is an aliveness to the marks made by the thinned paint after it leaves the brush and encounters gravity, moving sideways, creating angled curves, or more or less flowing directly downward. The field of modulated color is meditative, and full of incident, held between the dark vertical boundaries that enable the field to be concentrated, rather than expanded as an otherwise all-over monochrome might. The specificity of the painting qua painting is as unforced as it is intense.

Video | Biala: The Rash Acts of Rescue and Escape

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

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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?

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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.

Virtual Event | Biala: The Rash Acts of Rescue and Escape

Biala (1903-2000) “June Femme,” c.1933, Oil on panel, 25 1/2 x 21 1/4 in (66 x 55.9 cm) Collection of the Estate of Janice Biala © Estate of Janice Biala / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

January 6, 2021 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm | Free

Lecture by
Jason Andrew, Independent Scholar, Curator and Producer in New York

with
Julia Gleich, Choreographer

Introduced by
Rachel Stern, Executive Director of the Fritz Ascher Society in New York

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.

Jason Andrew 

is an independent scholar, curator, and producer. He is the founding partner at Artist Estate Studio LLC, the entity that represents the estates of Jack Tworkov, Janice Biala, and Elizabeth Murray among others. He has written, lectured, and curated extensively on the life and art of Janice Biala and her contemporaries including a retrospective of the artist’s work at Provincetown Art Association and Museum in 2018, as an exhibition focused on Biala’s work 1952-1962 on view at McCormick Gallery, Chicago through January 2021.

Julia K Gleich

is a choreographer, teacher, scholar and mathematics aficionado with an MA from the Bolz Center for Arts Administration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA from the University of Utah. In 2004, Julia Gleich, in partnership with Jason Andrew, founded Norte Maar for Collaborative Projects in the Arts with a mission to renew and refresh the exchange within the interdisciplinary arts. She then became a partner in Artist Estate Studio, LLC. Ms. Gleich is the founder and Artistic Director of Gleich Dances, which has received critical notice in The New York Times, DanceInforma, DanceInsider, Village Voice, The New Criterion, The Brooklyn Rail, among others.

The event is part of our monthly series
Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression, which is generously sponsored by Allianz Partners.
Future events and the recordings of past events can be found HERE.