SANDY WINTERS Creation and Destruction Museum of Art – DeLand Downtown Januar y 25 – March 24, 2019
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It is a great pleasure to present this exhibition surveying the recent sensitive and imaginative work of Sandy Winters. Hers is a rich art, drawing from literature, politics, science, theater, the dance, reflecting an affinity for the Latin civilizations, and a delight in the masks and costumes in which people have cloaked their roles in life. Winters’ amalgam of images, both abstract and representational, are uniquely individual, but not obscure or idiosyncratic. Most of all, she has mastered her mixed media approach thoroughly, and she has transmitted a sense of the value of that mastery to all who have experienced her work. To Sandy Winters, whose career I have supported and followed with interest and admiration during my tenure as Executive Director at both the Museum of Art, Ft. Lauderdale and the Boca Raton Museum of Art, I would like to express my gratitude for her patience and assistance in helping the staff organize this exhibition of her work. The following donors and businesses merit special appreciation for their support of this presentation and their commitment to this year’s exhibition schedule: Robert Apgar, Dennis Aylward, Barbara Baugh, Bruce and Carolyn Bigman, Samuel and Donna Blatt, Tom and Jean Burns, Bill and Terri Booth, Thomas and Loretta Chudy, Earl and Patti Colvard, Sal Cristofano and Laura Gosper, Ed and Pauline Lacey, Manny De La Vega, Wayne and Jewel Dickson, Robert and Linda Dorian, Lee and Susan Downer, Rich and Lilas George, Susan Griffis, Lorna Jean Hagstrom, John and Karen Horn, Pat Heller, Betty Drees-Johnson, Ray and Betty Johnson, Craig and Tracy Lindsey, Tim and Mary Jeanne Ludwig, Robin May, David Meier, Greg and Beth Milliken, Todd Phillips, Tommy and Dagny Robertson, Stephen and Claudia Roth, Carol Spinner, William Suddaby, Judith Thompson, Jack and Phyllis Wertenteil, Ian Williams and Nancy Hutson, John and Nancy Wilton, Boulevard Tire Center, E.O. Painter Printing Company, Florida Hospital DeLand, JetBlue, Massey Services, Inc., United Parachute Technology, West Volusia Beacon, W.W. Gay Mechanical Contractor, Inc., The Daytona Beach News Journal, Mainstreet Community Bank, ZOM Holdings, Lorna Jean Brooks Foundation, Inc., Duke Energy Foundation, Jewish Community Fund, Lacey Family Charitable Foundation, Medtronic Foundation, Publix Supermarket Charities, Scott and Susan Shay Philanthropic Fund, Wells Fargo Foundation, Faith Hope & Charity, DeLand Breakfast Rotary, DeLand Fall Festival of the Arts, DeLand Rotary Club, Inc., Orange City Blue Spring Manatee Festival, Krewe of Amalee, Krewe Nouveau, Museum Guild, City of DeLand, County of Volusia and State of Florida Division of Cultural Affairs. I would like to acknowledge our Museum’s Board of Trustees, led by Retired Gen. Lee Downer, President, for enabling the Museum to realize its ambitious, diverse and internationally recognized exhibition program. Finally, I would like to applaud my staff whose efficient and tireless efforts in all aspects of the researching, marketing and educational programing associated with this exhibition were a constant source of encouragement. George S. Bolge CEO, Museum of Art DeLand, Florida
Tree of Life, 2010, Oil, graphite on wood, 96 x 72 inches
ZEITGEIST: THE WORLD OF SANDY WINTERS In 1817, Goethe wrote that all cultures go through four stages. The first is one of community and powerfully shared symbols and visions. The second and third become progressively analytical and abstract. And the fourth stage is characterized as follows: “Human need, aggravated by the course of history, leaps backwards, confuses priestly folk, and religious beliefs, grabs now here, now there, at traditions, submerges itself in mysteries, sets fairy tales in the place of poetry, and elevates these to articles of belief.”1 In this exhibition, of Sandy Winter’s work completed during the past several years, one can sense the artist’s sudden shift in sensibility. The analytical and the formal are rejected, and strange new kinds of historicism, primitivism, and expressionism are embraced. There is a demi-allegory here that seemingly has not made up its mind whether to persuade, as in an argument, or to dissemble, like art; whether to consort with pain and despair, or to yield to an irrepressible desire to affirm humane values in man’s all-to-brief existence on Earth. With a seeming will of its own, the mixed media work in this exhibition cheerfully subverts its illusion to come down on the artist’s side as an unexpected, purely creative affirmation, perhaps attaining, thereby, an even more persuasive impact than by restating the familiar miseries and visual clichés of man’s solitary fate. In Sandy Winters’ poetic creations, it is not a question of overcoming the material, as the futile aesthetics extolled by so many people would have it, but of freeing the materials. Paintings, drawings and prints undergo a transformation as soon as they enter into the sphere of her art work. They change their nature; they embody something that transcends and governs them. Without losing their first values, they acquire, thanks to pictorial art, a great importance and, at the same time, constitute a sort of flash that opens access to another world to us. This artist’s touch is purely and simply what it is – rhythm, color, composition – and, at the same time, something else, another creative power of forms, a transparent material. The “touch” is the creation that goes further than the materials. Paradoxically, what goes further than the mixed media elements can be achieved only by mixed media elements, and surpasses the simple and happy inventions of technique: it is a creation of forms. Winters gives back to the very being of her material its original nature. As a good servant of pictorial art, she transforms it into a contradictory method. Her art constantly surpasses its history and its style. It becomes the result and the sum of all these elements: experience, feeling, emotion, intuition, unconscious thought, and looking. Winters’ art is primitive in a higher way. The creation of another rhythm, imitation, a copy of the true idea, madness, ecstasy, a childlike expression of the animal depths, nostalgia for a hidden world, the asceticism and sensuality of the game, a visionary moment, universal harmony – her art shows all faces. One of the faces it shows is the absurd megalomania of all human aspirations – the portrait. When this artist invents a manner or a style, she ceases to be a creator and turns into a designer fabricating products of applied art. Style is an external, decorative element. Sometimes Winters is governed or defeated by a style that does not belong uniquely to her but belongs to the period. In a sense, she has no style; she is the servant of her material and transcends it with absolute freedom. In her most recent work, physicality, for example, is expressed simply as technical prowess; at other times, it is ritualized action, a psychosexual event. A corollary to the expression of human nature as savage or childlike can be seen, also, in pieces such as these; civilization and civilized skills exist as a thin, artificial veneer. Winters reaction to recent art is a provocation thoroughly in the modern tradition. As Marshall Berman observed, “to appropriate the modernities of yesterday can be at once a critique of the modernities of today and an act of faith in the modernities… of tomorrow”.2 1 Quoted from Kathleen Agena, “The Return of Enchantment,” The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 27, 1983, pp. 79-80. 2 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), p. 36.
The themes pursued in this artist’s work, however, are not as simple as that. The artist seems to be paraphrasing the statement that the Conceptualist, Douglas Huebler, made as a work of art in 1969: “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more. I prefer simply to state the existence of things…” Winters appears to be expressing a similar feeling – not toward objects, but toward images. As another Conceptualist, Joseph Kosuth, observed in 1982, the rebirth of painting is “not simply painting but a reference to painting as if the artists are using the found fragments of a broken discourse.”3 Earlier in our century, when Expressionist and Surrealists explored the subjective and the “subconscious,” it was in a spirit akin to the then-new science of psychoanalysis and in an age of Grand Illusions, 2008, Flash acrylic, watercolor, pastel on paper, 48 x 48 inches rational ideals. Sandy Winters has different motives. Acting out the compulsions of the psyche physically instead of dissecting them analytically, she is attempting to retrieve or, at least, to represent atrophied instincts as well as critiquing the images bequeathed us from styles of the modern past. Her work seems to be less involved with abstract forms than with representing the externalized images of abstract forms by “mark-making”. Although identity may have been a central concern of the seventies, nonentity is more pertinent now. When a work of art is inhabited by pre-existing images and forms, or simulates emotional gestures to express an angst of emptiness, it is the lack of identity that comes to the fore. That is one of the consequences of the loss of faith in the modernist ethos of originality. But when the reactionary is seen as the radical, the past as the future, the old as the new, and the spurious as the genuine, broader issues of individuality and authenticity crop up. The present retreat, with its desire for falsity, for manipulated images, repossessed styles, prepackaged forms, is an ambivalent attempt to return to old values. As modernist belief systems are becoming increasingly inadequate, artists are exposing awful truths and giving profound warning. In the late stage of a culture which is cast adrift in contradictions, haunted by myths of history and style and by omens of vulnerability, Sandy Winters is uneasily grabbing hold of traditions, however spurious they may be, and elevating them to stave off disbelief. She draws upon the elementary symbolism that has accompanied human history. For her, the work of art is not so much an ideal product as an activity through which the individual asserts her sense of life. Her art can be compared to a process, a living tracing of the ceaseless activity of the imagination. We can think about her art in terms of a new Zeitgeist, a sudden break with the past, an unexpected reversal of taste, or we can call it a last waltz with modernism. g.s.b. 3Joseph Kosuth, “Necrophilia Mon Amour,” Artforum, May 1982.
SELECTED BIOGRAPHY Education 1975-77 1972-74 1968-71 1967-68
M.F.A., Cornell University, Ithaca New York Graduate work, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston Massachusetts B.S., cum laude, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas
Awards and Grants New York Foundation for the Arts, NYFA Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts New York Foundation for the Arts Fiscal, Sponsor for Metamorphosis: Exhibition/Tour, NYFA Indiana State University Art Gallery, Williamson Memorial Award Florida State Visual Arts Fellowship Recipient Southern Arts Federation/National Endowment for the Arts Florida State Visual Arts Fellowship, Honorable Mention Recipient Minority Faculty Development Grant, Florida International University, Miami, Florida Faculty Research Development Grant, Florida International University, Miami, Florida Florida State Visual Arts Fellowship Recipient Southern Arts Federation/National Endowment for the Arts Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition, Excellence in Printmaking Award Creative & Performing Arts Grant, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Selected Collections The Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio Dyke Art Foundation, Little Rock, Arkansas The Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, Arkansas The Boca Raton Museum, Boca Raton, Florida Art Museum, Johnson County Community College, Kansas John and Mable Ringling School of Art and Design, Sarasota, Florida Miami Dade Community College, Miami, Florida Orlando Art in Public Places, City of Orlando, Florida Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, Florida The Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas Shearson-Lehman/Robinson-Humphrey, Montgomery, Alabama Champion International Corp. Stamford, Connecticut Kaufman, Rothfeder & Blitz, Montgomery, Alabama Balch & Bingham, Birmingham, Alabama Metro-Dade Art in Public Places, Miami, Florida The White House, Washington D.C. The Dutch Institute Withholding Corporation The Prudential Insurance Company of America, Jacksonville, Florida Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co., New York, New York The Bank of Boston, Boston Massachusetts Southeast Banking Corporation, Miami, Florida American Bankers Group Insurance, Miami, Florida United National Bank of Miami, Miami, Florida Rollins Foundation, Graymoor, Garrison, New York The Prudential Insurance Company of America, New York, New York She Takes You Down the River, 2007, Flash acrylic, Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, New York watercolor, graphite on paper, 48 x 48 inches Tulsa City-County Public Library, Tulsa, Oklahoma
Jack’s Demise, 2013, Flash acrylic, graphite, collage on paper, 51 ½ inches x 68 ½ inches
Near Treacherous Waters, 2013, Flash acrylic, graphite, collage on paper, 52 inches x 72 1/4 inches
catalogue *All pieces lent by Artist
1. Don’t Drink the Water, 2014, Graphite, conte, pastel, block print, wood, paper collage on paper, 52 x 208 in. 2. Tears to Wide to Cross, 2013, Graphite, block print on rice paper, 26 ¼ x 70 in. 3. Trojan Duck, 2006-2009, Block print on collaged paper, 27 x 27 in. 4. Greeting the Unexpected, 2013, Block print, graphite on rice paper, 26 ¼ x 23 ½ in. 5. Avoiding Rough Waters, 2008, Graphite, block print on paper, 48 x 48 in. 6. She Takes You Down the River, 2007, Flash acrylic, watercolor, graphite on paper, 48 x 48 in. 7. The Night Shift, 2008, Collage, watercolor on paper, 48 x 48 in. 8. Near Treacherous Waters, 2013, Flash acrylic, graphite, collage on Arches paper, 52 x 72 ¼ in. 9. Jack’s Demise, 2013, Flash acrylic, graphite, collage on Arches paper, 51 ½ x 68 ½ in. 10. Contemplating Silence, 2013, Flash acrylic, graphite, collage on Arches paper, 51 ½ x 68 ½ in. 11. The Glass is Half Full, 2016, Flash acrylic, graphite, newspaper collage on Arches paper, 62 x 80 in. 12. Conveyor Belts and Crystal Balls, 2017, Flash acrylic, graphite, collage with block print and newspaper on Arches cover stock paper, 52 x 72 ½ in. 13. Tree of Life, 2010, Oil, graphite on wood, 96 x 72 in. 14. Against the Tide, 2007, Oil, print, graphite on wood, 48 x 48 in. 15. Seven Deadly Sins, 2010, Oil on wood, 72 x 96 in. 16. Devil’s Hair Cut, 2006, Oil, aluminum, graphite on wood, 48 x 48 in. 17. Bring ‘em On, 2007, Oil, aluminum, graphite, print on wood, 72 x 72 in. 18. Meltdown, 2007, Oil, aluminum, graphite on wood, 48 x 48 in. 19. Not in My Backyard, 2004, Oil, aluminum, collage on wood, 48 x 48 in. 20. Don’t Pop My Bubble, 2005, Oil, aluminum, collage on wood, 48 x 48 in. 21. Living in a Fishbowl, 2004, Oil, aluminum, graphite on wood, 48 x 48 in. 22. Goodyear, Bad Times, 2004, Oil, collage on wood, 48 x 48 in. 23. Metamorphosis, 2007, Graphite, pastel, block print collage, fabric on paper,104 x 156 in.
24. Where the Light’s Too Strong, 2008, Pastel, watercolor, collage prints on paper, 52 x 52 in. 25. Grand Illusions, 2008, Flash acrylic, watercolor, pastel on paper, 48 x 48 in. 26. Night Lights And Beads, 2003, block print, collage, graphite, paper, 24 ½ x 40 in. 27. Meet Again, 2003, block print, graphite, paper, 23 x 31 ¾ in. 28. Unlikely Partner, 2003, block print, graphite, paper, 23 ½ x 32 in. 29. Once Again Born Again, 2008, Graphite, block print on paper, 22 ¾ x 31 in. 30. Darwin’s Break, 2003, Block print, graphite, paper, 20 ¼ x 30 in. 31. On Thin Ice, 2009, Graphite, block print on paper, 20 ¼ x 30 ½ in. 32. Out of Hand, 2008, Graphite, block print on paper, 20 ¼ x 30 ½ in. 33. Farm Machine, 2008, Graphite, block print on paper, 20 ¼ x 30 ½ in. 34. Fully Equipped, 2003, Watercolor, graphite, print, paper, 21 ¼ x 31 in. 35. Search Light, 2003, Block print, watercolor, graphite, on paper, 21 ¼ x 31 in. 36. Pretexts and Subtexts, 2003, Block print, 15 x 72 in. 37. Quick Sand and Slow Dogs, 2014, Block print on rice paper, 15 x 11 ¾ in. 38. Side Stepping, 2014, Block print on rice paper, 12 x 15 ½ in. 39. Contemplation, 2012, Block print on rice paper, 9 ½ x 25 in. 40. Son of a Gun, 2014, Block print on rice paper, 12 x 15 ½ in. 41. Caught in the Headlights, 2013, Block print on rice paper, 12 x 18 in. 42. Leap Frog Justice, 2014, Block print on rice paper, 15 ½ x 12 in. 43. On Thin Ice, 2013, Block print on rice paper, 15 ½ x 11 ½ in. 44. Waiting to Exhale, 2014, Block print on rice paper, 12 x 12 in. 45. Dance Me to the Edge of Freedom, 2014, Block print on rice paper, 12 x 12 in. 46. Edge of Darkness, 2014, Block print on rice paper, 12 x 12 in.
Conveyor Belts and Crystal Balls, 2017, Flash acrylic, graphite, collage with block print and newspaper on paper 52 x 72 ½ inches
Cover: Seven Deadly Sins, 2010, Oil on wood, 72 x 96 inches
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