When Racism and Sexism Are No Longer Fashionable. Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction

By Lisa Jaye Young

When racism and sexism are no longer fashionable, how much will your art collection be worth? In 1989, almost thirty years ago, the Guerilla Girls posed this now infamous question to the art world.  In a perfect world, one that we clearly do not yet enjoy, it would be great to think that the “Magnetic Fields” exhibition of modern and contemporary abstraction by women of color marks this moment. The ideal moment when racism and sexism are so unfashionable that they play no role. “Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today,” encompassing painting, sculpture, installation, printmaking, drawing, in painterly, post-painterly, hard-edge and process-based abstraction, was recently on view at The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. It was organized by Curator of the Mildred Thompson Estate, Melissa Messina, and by Erin Dziedzic, director of Curatorial Affairs at The Kemper Museum. It can be described as an extremely ambitious show that I hope will grow larger within a couple of years as it pulls more artists into its wake and assembles works by women of color who have embraced abstraction in all forms of material practice. Though many of the artworks start from the impetus of identity or of personal experience, not all of them do, and that is part of the point. This show is about abstraction as a strategy and of some women who have been, at times, left out of that art history. It is about the practice of art as part of and beyond, but not limited to, the circumstances of self and narrative.

Mildred Thompson, Untitled (Wood Picture), c. 1966, found wood, acrylic, 25 ½” x 38 ¼.” New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana. Museum purchase, Leah Chase Fund.

It is the policy of many orchestras worldwide, that when auditioning new musicians, a stage curtain hangs between musician and jury. The music speaks solely on its merit to the conductor and the jury. A musician is hired based upon his or her art, regardless of gender and race. The artist is an artist, rather than a white male artist or a black female artist. And yet we live in a world now in which it is ever-more encouraged practice to post one’s photograph on every professional website or even on one’s C.V., emphasizing identity and “the personal look” over content and achievement. This exhibition adds to this important conversation about art and identity with artworks that stand alone, but are even more powerful in conversation with one another about personal struggles against racism and sexism, and in color, energy, matter, materials, science, process and memory. In an ideal world, we could fluidly and productively appreciate both, and artists could be who they are and make what they want to make.

I love that about “Magnetic Fields.” It wants the best of all worlds. Named after the featured painting in the exhibition by the late Mildred Thompson, the title exerts undeniable symbolic power. A magnetic field is a field composed of constantly moving currents, each one exerting energy and change (force, direction, and magnitude) on the next: a force field. The works operate like force fields bouncing off one another, gathering energy. The language, i.e. the words associated with abstraction, play an important role in suggestive meaning and in the construction of dialogue. The titles are significant. Like “Magnetic Fields,” the images and titles in this wee but mighty show, foster conversation with one another while maintaining individual voices: both individuation and unity. This is arguably a model system, or perhaps a good new year’s resolution for 2018. The funny thing is that this system, one that emphasizes individual voice as a way to foster collective well-being rather than as a way of competing with one another per se, tends to already be how so many women operate daily: capable of being individuals while also supporting others. This exhibition is about the role of this force field in art history, as many of the voices included here have been left out of the textbooks (while ironically so many of the artists gathered here have contributed to teaching and curricula-building, community and leadership in various levels of American school systems in addition to their studio practice). It is about women’s history and the power of visual poetry, the power of an abstract vocabulary. And mostly it is about a struggle to be an artist, an artist without identity descriptors before her name, an artist first and foremost.

Mildred Thompson, Untitled (Wood Picture), c. 1972, found wood, acrylic, 48 ¾” x 36” x 2 ½.” New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana. Museum purchase, Leah Chase Fund.

In a number of cases these artists, ranging in chronology from Alma Thomas (b. 1891, d. 1978) to Abigail Deville (b. 1981), have practiced under the radar, though not intentionally, of the art historical canon, even though each one included has experienced a full, multi-faceted, public and professional career as an artist on some level. After being stopped in my tracks while encountering individual works by Sylvia Snowden, Alma Thomas, Mavis Pusey, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Betty Blayton, and frankly by just about every work in these galleries, I left D.C. with the feeling that my art history education, after attending nine years of undergraduate and graduate classes, had been deficient. Where were these women in my classes? I had a sinking feeling that I had to some extent been robbed; even as I had studied with some of the most established feminist art historians. Not to place blame on my professors, as the names presented here were not in the textbooks, nor in the museums; but where were these artists in chapters about abstraction in the 1950s, Minimalism and post-Minimalism in the 1960s, Conceptualism, the return of painting, and Installation from the 1970s through the 1980s and 90s? This exhibition achieves its ambitious goals of extending the recent dialog incurred during exhibitions such as the one held at The Denver Art Museum in 2016 entitled “Women of Abstract Expressionism” curated by Gwen Chanzit, and other exhibitions that have begun to ask: where have they been? In the words of the curators: “‘Magnetic Fields’…pays tribute to the lived experience of each of the featured artists, who have come individually to pursue abstraction, disrupting the presumption that representation and narrative beholden to figuration are the prime modes of visualizing personal experience.”1

THE HUMAN STRUGGLE TO BE ABSTRACT

With this relation between individual and collective experience in mind, Lowery Stokes Sims, in her dynamic essay for the “Magnetic Fields” catalog, quotes the Abstract Expressionist painter Norman Lewis, who struggled with allowing himself to embrace an abstract vocabulary in an era when Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and other peers were embracing figuration and narrative, collage and realism, as part of an effort to depict what Bearden called “the black experience.” Lewis felt at times obligated to paint the struggle, but he also resisted it and persisted with abstraction. Sims quotes Lewis: “He then concluded that his ‘own greatest effectiveness would not come by painting racial difficulties, but by excelling as an artist first of all.’”2 The question has been itself a struggle. Is it okay to be an artist first and foremost or does being an artist of color, or a woman artist, somehow necessitate or demand attention to realism and the narration of struggle? Does abstraction neutralize identity? The art historian Patricia Hills, in a recent Jacob Lawrence symposium at The SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, re-stated Jacob Lawrence’s directive that “If you don’t feel struggle, there is no passion.”3 But to add to and clarify this she added: “this was his moral compass, that the black American experience is the human experience.” In this sense of art as passion, the freshness, newness, and sharpness of the works in this show are tangible.

Upon entering the exhibit, most viewers are enveloped in the brightness and boldness of what color can achieve; a warm wave of optimism is palpable. And yet political and social questions are quickly detected, deeply embedded within past struggles-questions that remain alive today. It is part of the achievement of this exhibition that optimism and the power of visual abstraction endure in the same space as the poignant and urgent realism of a desire for justice. With works by artists of all ages confronting similar questions, it is as if we continue to re-hash similar issues in new forms; we need to pay closer attention in order to learn from past mistakes. Maren Hassinger’s Wrenching News (2008) is an installation of shredded New York Times newspaper articles, and is the first work encountered. Its hand-wrenched twists and curls are so fresh that it could be made and re-made every day of the week as we speak. Wrenching news and disturbing current events feel today, eight years later, like a piling up of disorder within the manicured Minimalist circle whose form it takes. Diminishing or developing, neatening or unraveling, its degree of dilation is uncertain. As a work that hovers between realism and abstraction, it shares this condition with many works in the galleries, including a neighboring painting by Brenna Youngblood entitled Yardguard (mixed media on canvas, 2015) - the barely there ghost image of a chain-link fence burst open by the potential of vibrant color that spills its suggestion of violence or freedom or both. Also nearby, in curatorial and inter-generational harmony, is a fabric collage on canvas over wood panel by Shinique Smith, some twenty-five years younger than Hassinger, entitled Whirlwind Dancer (2014-2017). A perfect storm of graffiti and calligraphy in cyclonic motion, with advertising fragments and fiery line work that blends dramatically with natural peacock and fabric manufactured feathers; its details suggest the need to experience a work of art in person and in time. Her work references connectivity between personal and world events, linking biography and history, physical fragments of the real caught up in an abstracted expression of how real events combine with how we feel about them. Events are never just plain events but are tempered, negotiated, and energized by emotion and memory.

Brenna Youngblood, Yardguard, 2015, Mixed media on canvas, 72” x 60.” Courtesy of the artist and Tilton Gallery, New York. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

This first gallery sets a tone for a larger, cross-generational conversation between works in each intimate room, and then between spaces. Each room is punctuated with a dark charcoal tone, and each space, in a way, starts over, standing alone as a full exhibition on its own terms. Each creates its own conversation between works, between artists. And yet each room relays back to the previous room or links on to the next room, as if hearing these voices for the first time, each one gathering steam with the next, creating an environment that is energetic, determined and engaged. A glance through the fierce biographies of each artist in the show’s catalog supports this observation with a vast multitude of individual and collective experience; everything from Fordham to Howard, from Yale to Harvard, from The Studio Museum to The Skowhegan School, from L.A. to D.C. and from Louisiana and Florida to New York and Detroit, from 1891 to 2018, with many stops in between. Like facing an intimidating wall of heroic figures, each artist is more badass and wondrous than the next.

MILDRED’S LEGACY

The large-scale oil painting, that is the eye of the storm for this show, focusing the catalog, the title, and the centerpiece to the first gallery, is Mildred Thompson’s Magnetic Fields (1991). A triptych measuring 70.5 x 150 inches, it pulls the viewer into the first space. It represents a certain rediscovery of this peripatetic, Atlanta-based artist and teacher. It acts as a vortex pulling together multiple generations of works encompassing four gallery spaces, an entire floor of this museum, focused on a history of art produced by women. Thompson’s life and work participate in a visual history of idea exploration above and beyond a political history of identity politics. As Melissa Messina notes in a catalog for the first solo exhibition for Mildred Thompson to be held at Galerie Lelong in New York City in February 2018, “Thompson was both of and beyond her time, aware of but caring little for art world trends and prescriptions for her age, race and gender” and instead focusing on her studies of space and movement, quantum physics and dynamism.4 Thompson was so much a part of this struggle as a woman of color, unaccepting of gendered binaries and expectations for young women growing up in the early 1950s. Like Norman Lewis, Thompson dedicated her practice to abstraction, in many ways swimming against the current. Her practice was experimental and resistant, inspired by music and harmonies, Kandinsky and Nevelson (with whom she also may have worked for a short time as a studio assistant in the early 1960s), computer programming and cosmological observations, frequencies, and vibrations, energy and matter. She went to Germany “where she felt she could develop more freely as an artist without the constraints of American identity politics and its limitations.”5

Mavis Pusey, Solitude, 1963, oil on canvas, 46 1/8” x 29 2/4.” Beverly A. Berman and Jeffrey K. Backerman Collection, Concord, Massachusetts.

In her essay, Sims notes that Thompson moved to Germany in 1963 in order to find solace as an artist outside of the dictates of American racial politics, a defining year for the Civil Rights momentum. She became “involved in composing music with a synthesizer and a computer program in addition to printmaking, photography, and writing-and she developed a body of sculpture in the 1990s, using modules of invented shapes that recalled piano hammers.” Her wood reliefs, or Wood Pictures series, two of which are presented here, are like sculptures that have become paintings, the imprecision and suggested patina of found wooden fragments such as clothespins and irregular scraps combine with the precision and pasteurization of flat white paint in two Untitled from 1966. In one exhibit from 1972, now in the New Orleans Museum of Art collection, stretcher and wooden painting unite as the beauty and imperfections of knots and lines in the wood are seen beyond function, as abstract forms and pieces are shaped to reveal a bold cobalt blue pennant of solid paint as if directly provoking Greenberg’s notions of medium specificity and “purity.” Indestructible and painterly, sculptural and flat, geometric and shadowy, they suggest the power of transformation, the dialog that an artist has not just with the world around her, but with materials and the unexpected qualities that they can generate.

Thompson’s legacy as an enduring practitioner is shared with so many artists in this show. Philadelphia-born Barbara Chase-Ribaud, sculptor, best-selling novelist of a book on Sally Hemings, and award-winning poet residing in France, combines solidity and softness in unexpected material reciprocities. Black bronze and wool rope, monochromatic metallic and fibrous, both materials hold powerful form, texture and symbolic associations. With titles like Zanzibar/Black (1974-1975) and Malcolm X (2008), these human-scale stele forms reference history and the black body, and spill vertically onto the floor in stratified sinews of toughness and softness, seeking likeness in one another. Her work is an example of how each of the artists in this exhibition needs to take up much more space in American cultural awareness. Nearby, Sylvia Snowden’s large upright acrylic on canvas painting entitled June 12 (1992) is a reference to her parents’ wedding anniversary. It is so voluminous and momentous, the brightest of oranges next to royal blue, ignited into blazing 3-D chunks of paint, underline the expressivity of emotions connected to events, even events suggested through the memory of a parent.

In fact, “Magnetic Fields,” taking its namesake from Thompson’s fiery cosmology of energy, points to the importance and impact of titles and the suggestive power of words within the field and history of abstraction. Unmoored from figuration and titles, Untitled has the power to hint, to glimpse, to reveal a secret, and to point the gaze, without limiting the work’s interpretation. This dialog between image and title is a delicate balancing act for the abstract artist, who generally does not want to over-influence the viewer’s journey. However, this dynamic provides a kind of key, offering a tone or a frame of mind for the works assembled as abstract forms. They include scratches, fragments, stains, shadows, planks, cuts, piles, bunches, and folds. They operate as gestures of emotional catharsis, secretive visual outpourings, hidden joys, deep-seated fears, political protests, and “ideas waiting to be heard,” as suggested by the title of Betty Blayton’s exceptional and extraordinarily overlooked large monoprint from 1984. Other appellations have similar suggestiveness, a perfect marriage of materials and process with a type of reflection that is personal in its inception but universal in its reception. Gilda Snowden’s vibrant and layered Imaginary Landscape (acrylic on canvas, 2006) opens a window into possibility offering a dynamic balance of natural and conceptual space. This balance seems an instinctual fit in the work of a Detroit-based trailblazer for the imagination, bridging theater and visual art. Mavis Pusey’s (b. 1928) shockingly overlooked, but aptly named Solitude (oil on canvas, 1963), underlines Lowery Stokes Sims’ additional observation that “the prevalence of identity-based exhibitions in the late 20^th century further marginalized black female artists who focused on nonobjective abstraction.”6 Solitude has (and is) both a face and not a face. A surface glance shows anomalous geometries of red, black, and brownish canvas weave, befitting for any mid-century setting. A second glance reveals eye, nose, and mouth, the revelation of an unseen face. Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s Racism is Like Rain, Either It’s Raining or It’s Gathering Somewhere (acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 1993) at approximately 140 inches long, divides the canvas between a massive monochrome front of charcoal gray and a dripping, oozing, chromatic metaphor for systems of energy, harrowing and precipitous, like some kind of inevitability.

In other words, titles do matter. They may crystallize an artistic response to experience, offering a poetic, shared insight that can be deeply felt, when paired with the work of art, pairing in turn the artist and the viewer at that moment of witness. This is also why the title for this show matters, “Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today.” The title of the exhibition was not “black women and abstraction,” but rather the show sought, as a kind of commemoration to artists who have passed and out of respect for those represented, to emphasize the content, rather than to re-marginalize the maker; to give each artist some room of her own.

Mary Lovelace O'Neal, Racism is Like Rain, Either it’s Raining or it’s Gathering Somewhere, 1993, acrylic on canvas, 86” x 138.” Mott-Warsh Collection, Flint, Michigan. © Mary Lovelace O’Neal.

So, since titles matter, I must admit that there is one thing about the experience with this exhibition at The National Museum for Women in the Arts that I wondered about. And that is, with such a provocative symbolic title, and such a compelling painting as a central image for advertising material including potential brochures, city buses, and metropolitan kiosks around D.C., I have wondered why did the museum choose to re-package the show with the label “Black & Abstract”? The advertisements for the show depict this question on a two-sided black and white solid graphics. The title and spellbinding painting Magnetic Fields is already so powerful. The works assembled within this unbelievable gem of a museum, connecting the show to a larger history of art and of women makers, is already itself such a compelling combination. It seems that to re-label the show in binary terms as black and abstract is to undo this exhibition’s successful premise. The show’s curators and artists arguably propose a space outside of the control of reductive binaries, and so for marketing to add this label on both the website and the promotional material perhaps re-inscribes tired dualities rather than recognizing the value of multivalence, reinforcing identity politics rather than celebrating the flourishing content. It re-labels artists whose works and lives in many ways have sought to disrupt labels and break free of binaries, even to the point of moving physically across an ocean in order to escape them. Marketing forces certainly dictate much of what we see today and of course, it is the goal of any museum to pull in visitors and so the packaging of an exhibition today is delicate and so this position is not one of blame.

But this doesn’t mean that we should continue to accept that marketing should preside or should decide how content is presented. “The goal of this show,” writes Lilly Wei in an essay for the catalog, “is to correct the omissions in the historical record, writing into it the many significant contributions made by women abstract artists, in particular, those from much more biased times.”7 Selling it as marginalized, though, may predispose the viewer to the suggestion that we read the work as such. The role of identity is different for each artist, for each work, and for each generation. This was honored by the museum inside within the galleries, so why not on the outside? We are all in this together and working together is the only option. No one ever said that questioning tradition would be easy. It has always been an “unfashionable” task, but that is changing.

Mildred Thompson, Magnetic Fields, 1991, oil on canvas, 70 ½” x 150.” Courtesy of the Mildred Thompson Estate, Atlanta, Georgia.

HOW MUCH WILL YOUR ART COLLECTION BE WORTH?

So when racism and sexism are no longer fashionable, how much will your art collection be worth? Given the power and rising star of the artists in “Magnetic Fields,” and the harmony of their voices individually and within a newly recognized and energized cross-generational system, this collection will be highly valuable in both dollars and cents but mostly in dollars and truths. These are magnitudes that one cannot take with him or her, but that through the support of this work, a legacy may be left behind for the next field of young forces. The artist, Jack Whitten, whom this world lost in January 2018, said it well, echoing so many voices: “I sincerely believe that in the black community of artists, especially those of us dealing with abstraction, art has to go beyond the general notions of race, gender, nationalism,” he told Art in America magazine in 2013.8 But perhaps it was the title of his obituary that should be quoted instead: “Artist of Wide-Ranging Curiosity.” Curiosity and substance, self-awareness and poetic truth blaze the trail in “Magnetic Fields,” hopefully signaling that the rest of the world needs to catch up because racism and sexism surely are no longer fashionable.

NOTES

1. Erin Dziedzic and Melissa Messina, “Magnetic Fields: An Introduction,” in Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today (Kansas City: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 2017). p.13.

2. Lowery Stokes Sims, p.37.

3. Patricia Hills, Guest Lecturer for “Jacob Lawrence: Lines of Influence,” SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA, Thursday, October 19, 2017.

4. Melissa Messina, “Mildred Thompson: Radiation Explorations and Magnetic Fields,” Galerie Lelong & Co., February 22 - March 31, 2018. New York.

5. Ibid.

6. Sims, in Magnetic Fields, p.17.

7. Lilly Wei, “For Women of Color Who Have Considered Art in Which Abstraction is Enough,” in Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today (Kansas City: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 2017), p.65.

8. Neil Genzlinger, “Jack Whitten, Artist of Wide-ranging Curiosity Dies at 78.” The New York Times (January 23, 2018). <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/obituaries/jack-whitten-artist-of-wide-ranging-curiosity-dies-at-78.html?&moduleDetail=section-news-1&action=click&contentCollection=Obituaries&region=Footer&module=MoreInSection&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&pgtype=article>

Lisa Jaye Young teaches art history at the Savannah College of Art and Design. She earned her doctorate in art history from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and her B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh. She has contributed criticism to ArtReview, Tema Celeste, Performing Arts Journal, ARTPULSE and Burnaway. She has published numerous exhibition catalogs and book essays, including a chapter in The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s (University of Michigan Press, 2011).