Minna Resnick – Cover and pp

Minna Minna Resnick Resnick

By remixing cultural and historical narratives that focus on the ways we communicate both verbally and through our bodies, Resnick’s work invites the viewer to not only engage with the story within the image, but consider our own way of transmission.

Hi Minna. Thank you so much for talking to us. Your oeuvre is so impressive! Your website shows work going back to the 1970s and it doesn’t seem like you’ve taken a break. Can you remember the first exhibition you had of your own work? Where was it and what did you show? What do you remember about it?

Actually, I cheated and had to look it up in my resume. After all, it’s almost 50 years ago. But it’s a doozy. I thank you for unleashing some of the most memorable times in my early career. You might be sorry you asked, as this is a very long answer. My first solo show was in Canberra, Australia! We spent a semester there in late 1974/early 1975 – their terms are on a different calendar than ours. My husband was asked to be a scientific research fellow at Australian National University. Canberra is the capital of Australia and at that time was a backwater and a pretty bleak place to live; just civil servants and university personnel with barely a restaurant and one cinema. The National Gallery of Australia lived in a warehouse. However, it had a fabulous small art gallery owned by Ruth Prowse, who was in her 50s when she opened Gallery Huntly, shortly before I arrived. Every time my husband and I traveled abroad, the first thing I packed was a large pile of photos of my model, as I expected to

Did You Ever Ask Why Mixed Media Drawing (digital, solvent transfer, colored pencil, acrylic ink 16 1/8" x 24 1/16" 2021

continue working. I also packed a portfolio of my prints since my identity is my artwork. I immediately looked for places to see art and came up blank except for Gallery Huntly. I ended up going there 2-3 times a week to see Ruth’s immense European and contemporary inventory, with the other days drawing in our apartment. She offered me a show within a month, and it opened before I left. I actually sold work and she represented me for years. One magical moment I especially remember is that she took me, since she knew every art person in town, into the National Gallery (still unopen to the pubic) to peek at Jackson Pollack’s “Blue Poles” which they had just purchased and unpacked. It was leaning up against a wall. At the time, most of Australia was angry that the government spent so much money on this purchase. Today it is the diamond of their contemporary collection.

Quick Exit Lithograph 9.5" x 12" 2019

Journey 1 Lithograph 22" x 17" 1975

Untitled (Rectangle #1) Lithograph 15" x 22.5" 1981

That’s a great story! It seems pretty rare that a first show would turn into a long relationship like that. At least nowadays I feel like most people’s first show is some tiny little gallery, coffee shop, or maybe a group or juried show. What have you learned about showing your work since then?

I’ve always been careful about where I show my work. Even before grad school, I knew I would never participate in an outdoor arts festival. I knew I wanted a professional relationship where the work was respected and handled properly (a former teacher/mentor made me aware that this should be my goal). So, early in my career, when a gallery had interest in my work, I asked a lot of questions, plus requested some artists that they represent, who I could talk to. You’d be surprised about those answers – how payment was late, how badly work was handled or damaged, how uninterested staff were in the work!!! So, I chose very carefully. I had few galleries that represented me, and each became family. They had my personal and artistic interests at heart. There was trust. Unfortunately, I have survived longer than all but one of my galleries and I’ve been with them since 1979!! What are your own tastes in art that you collect?

Oy. I collect everything and my taste is all over the place from abstract to photo realism, handmade toys and ceramics. And handmade earrings — that has to be my biggest collection! I guess I relate most to things that make me wonder or make me laugh. I also collect old broken and distressed dolls. I never spend more than five bucks on any of them and my greatest collection is very creepy and comes from the woman who cuts my hair. She was about to throw out dolls that she and her mother had used but at the last moment remembered that I might like them. Yes!!!

Dutch Curtain III Mixed Media Drawing 15" x 19" 1982

This might overlap with the last question, but what were your influences in your early career? What artists are you looking at now?

That’s another question that I might have a different take on. My undergraduate degree was in graphic design (at Philadelphia College of Art, now University of the Arts) and my program was intense. I minored in printmaking and loved it too. Briefly, I got a fabulous design job right out of college, worked creatively for a year, got married, lived abroad for two years (working as a graphic designer while my husband taught at a university), returned to the US (Palo Alto, CA where my husband then got a job at Stanford), and started working in printmaking across the Bay, in Hayward, in order to build up a portfolio to enter grad school. From my design background, I could easily have made beautiful arrangements of shapes, but was desperate for a personal identity. I needed to find out who I was. For almost 2 years after returning to the States, I never once opened an art book or magazine, and did not visit a gallery or museum. I was terrified of accidentally being influenced by someone else’s work. I started by photographing my husband and myself, but that quickly proved inadequate. It was there that I met my model, another art student and friend, who became my model for the next 25 years.

As to current inspirations, they are as varied as my minor collecting efforts. I just love looking at artwork of all kinds and disciplines. There is always something to learn, and also learn what not to do, when experiencing an image. (Again, if pushed, I could try to provide you with some specific artists – I’ve been in awe of Mantegna’s drapery forever and absolutely love the cheekiness and complicated composition of Phyllis Bramson’s paintings.) I won’t push. Ha! And I think that’s a great answer. I think it’s interesting you were aware of NOT wanting to be influenced by other artists. I find that visiting the museum is inspirational for me. I think a lot of artists just get some creative push from that – or reading or watching movies, or whatever. Then what is it that inspired (or inspires) you? Maybe you don’t need “something”? How about asking it this way: When and/or where do you do your best creative thinking?

I still get most inspired by museum and gallery shows and I don’t worry about them influencing my work anymore. I will look at anything! When we spent an academic year in NYC (my husband’s sabbatical in 2012-2013), I spent 3 days a week at the Blackburn Print shop making prints and 2 days a week going to exhibitions, eight hours a day (maybe seven). In the 9 months we were there I don’t think I missed a show, especially in Manhattan. Talk about eye-opening! I found out how much I didn’t know while living in upstate NY and happily working alone in my studio. I was introduced to the work of Thomas Nozkowski and Vanessa German through solo shows I saw. I also had a chance to see large exhibitions of work that I was already familiar with: Liliana Porter, Neo Rauch, Louise Bourgeois, Charles White, Vernon Fisher, Pat Andrea (Dutch), just to name a few. It was exhilarating. This visceral and emotional connection to the work inspired me in every way. Now, with personal viewing more out of reach, I continue to look at artist’s online, mostly through old-fashioned Facebook, where I post my new work and have many artist connections.

I think a really great artist is someone who remains creative and productive for a long time in a way that is consistent but never gets stale. Your work, to me, fits that description. The subject matter is almost always women, and there’s a similar aesthetic from the lithography and drawing style. But the images themselves don’t feel repetitive or schtick. How would you describe the overall themes you work with and how has that changed over time?

Can you tell us more about your collaboration with the printmaker in Bern? How did that start? I’m curious about your collaborative approach with your model too. What do you think those people – the printer and the model – bring to your work that you could not? Can you describe your creative process at all? Is there a method or what?

Oh dear. I guess the easiest way to explain this is what I mentioned about early influences: fear! Fear that I would have to find something so personal that it would last my lifetime. Perhaps that is what is consistent about my work. I was so lucky to have a close friend model only for me at the very beginning. She became the emotional connection to my themes of the public and private nature of a woman’s place in the world. I strongly think that the era into which you were born informs your perceptions throughout your lifetime. My parents were products of WWII and the Depression. I graduated college in 1968 during the heyday of the women’s movement. My beginning years were consumed by themes of personal internal feelings and external societal expectations that often led to contradictory actions and conflicting emotions. Her photos have been relevant ever since. Plus, I had inadvertently, over the course of time, accumulated an archive of a woman aging – a very convenient source material to an artist dealing with getting older.

By 2000, I was using appropriated visual materials, in addition to my model, to deal with inter-generational differences, which expanded into thinking about general informational delivery systems over the course of time and generational understanding. I’ve also been incorporating digital material into my work. Working with a printer in Bern, Switzerland, for more than 15 years, we first create a digital background onto which I would continue to draw in my Ithaca, NY, studio. Those digital images are appropriated and manipulated from sources such as old photos, children’s textbooks, and open-source museum collections from the nineteenth century.

Oh boy, my Bern connection is unusual. My husband was invited to work with colleagues for a month at the university in Bern in June 2004. I accidentally found out about the existence of a printshop there, in December 2003, from a show announcement that I received in the mail from a former print prof about work he did in a Bern print studio and was exhibiting in SF. I immediately emailed Tom Blaess (https://www.tomblaess.com) to inquire about being able to print there while my husband was working. Tom and I didn’t know each other but we shared four close friends and even more print connections (he’s originally from Detroit and moved to Switzerland in 1990.) We arranged that I would make images at his printshop for two weeks, which he would print for me. This was our first collaboration, printed from a huge flat-bed offset press. I came with several drawn images on mylar, Tom put them on photolitho plates and they were printed in different compositions and colors. Each piece of paper had a different configuration. I took all these first-layers home with me to my Ithaca studio and continued to draw on each to complete unique works. I returned to Bern in 2004 to have a show at his gallery (in the printshop) with these mixed media prints. Our following collaborations were digitally printed first-layers, printed on rag printmaking paper since it absorbs the ink differently than coated digital papers, much more like lithographic printing, which we both preferred. In spring 2023 I will have my fifth solo show in Bern.

I have been using the same model, a friend and fellow artist, since 1972. Since I draw very slowly, I started taking photographs of her to be more efficient with her time and more flexible with mine. Over time, we both moved from California, where we met. We’ve been living 2,000 miles apart for decades, but our close relationship has remained intact. Over those years, I visited her for about a week at a time, every 6 or 7 years, to go over themes and projects that have concerned me and taking the appropriate pictures. The last time we got together for a photo session was over 25 years ago, although we still keep in good contact. It has been very important for me to use a model that is a close friend, for two reasons. First, since I draw so slowly, it is wonderful to spend so much time drawing someone who you hold dear. Second, my friend modeled exclusively for me, and as a non-professional model, allowed for openness and an emotional vulnerability in her response to the camera, and me.

In overview, my work has generally focused on the visual meaning of language, starting decades ago with body language, and broadening it to include communication of every sort. Is there a method other than personal exploration? Not sure. My questions lead me down many paths and some of them become images. My aim is to encourage information displacement and disorientation. Remixing the narrative creates new associations. Each method changes and deconstructs any hierarchy of information. I hope to do this while still retaining a sense of humor.

One Little Regret Lithograph, Silkscreen 10" x 20" 2016

Garden Fresh Photo, Lithograph, Collagraph, Silkscreen 15" x 19" 2012

Is the Pillow Smooth and Inviting? Lithograph, Silkscreen 22.5" x 30" 2001

What kinds of other things do you like to do when you’re not making art? Are you a cook, a musician, a movie or book buff? An athlete or a gardener? What are your other interests?

What brings me joy when I’m not making work is gardening. We moved into our home in upstate NY over 30 years ago. It was a spec house on dirt. I planned and planted every tree, bush and flower in our garden. It is lush and peaceful after all this time though maintaining a low-maintenance garden is still a great deal of work. Pleasurable work. We live in Ithaca, a town surrounded by natural beauty, which includes multiple waterfalls and walking trails which have been especially appreciated during this past year and a half, as it is a relief and a joy to be outside, in every season. I also love cooking for guests, a good book (I’m in a great book club), folk dancing once a week for over 30 years, and of course, my great friends and family. I won the lottery on my adult children and their offspring. I’m now training my grandkids, from 3 ½ to 13, to make prints, which we can do in my basement studio every time they come to visit. Ah, my own studio with a large electric litho press. I guess that’s another story.