Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator - internal only by Ringling College

JUDITH LINHARES THE ARTIST AS CURATOR

BILL ADAMS ELLEN BERKENBLIT KARIN DAVIE DONA NELSON MARY JO VATH

This exhibition is made possible, in part, with generous support from: Gold Sponsor Gerald and Sondra Biller Silver Sponsors Elaine and Bill Crouse Rosemary and Lou Oberndorf

Wil and Sally Hergenrader Endowment Fund Dr. Eloise A. Werlin Endowment Fund Charles O. Wood, III and Miriam M. Wood Foundation Endowment Fund Sally Yanowitz Endowment Fund Cover images: Front: Detail view of Judith Linhares, Cave, 2010, Oil on linen, 54 x 72 x 1 1/2 in., Collection of Beth Lee and Adam Lloyd Beckerman

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Installation views of Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator at Sarasota Art Museum On view from November 27, 2021 through April 3, 2022 Photos: Daniel Perales

1001 South Tamiami Trail Sarasota, FL 34236 SarasotaArtMuseum.org

DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD It is an honor to present Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator at Sarasota Art Museum. This is the first time the Museum has offered an artist the opportunity to curate a portion of their own exhibition with other artists’ works. There was no artist better suited to take on this challenge than Judith Linhares, who has spent her career enveloped in various creative communities, from her time in the Bay Area to her position now in New York. We owe our gratitude to Judith—for letting us into her inner world through the exhibition of her dream journals and studio space, as well as her own works. We would also like to thank the five curated artists—Bill Adams, Ellen Berkenblit, Karin Davie, Dona Nelson, and Mary Jo Vath. The Sarasota Art Museum team contributed in countless ways to the success of Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator. Exhibition curator, Emory Conetta deserves special recognition for her dedication as do Christa Molinaro, Ryan Day, and all the members of the Sarasota Art Museum staff. We express our deep appreciation to the Sarasota County Tourist Development Tax Fund and to Gerald and Sondra Biller, Elaine and Bill Crouse, and Rosemary and Lou Oberndorf for generously providing lead support for this exhibition. Additional thanks go to presenting sponsors Community Foundation of Sarasota County and Sarasota Magazine along with the Wil and Sally Hergenrader Endowment Fund, Dr. Eloise A. Werlin Endowment Fund, Charles O. Wood, III, and Miriam M. Wood Foundation Endowment Fund, and the Sally Yanowitz Endowment Fund. Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator provides our audiences the chance to pull back the curtain and venture into these artists’ varied artist practices, garnering a stronger appreciation for the philosophies and techniques that guide each of them. The exhibition aligns with the Museum mission to be a catalyst for understanding and appreciation for the art of our time, and through Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator, our audiences have been able to do so in new and innovative ways.

Virginia Shearer Executive Director

Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator illuminates the wondrous world of Judith Linhares (b. 1940, California) and the abundance of inspirations that shape her artistic practice—from her time in the California Bay Area in the 1960s and 70s, to her dream journals, to other artists, five of whom Linhares has selected to include in the exhibition.

achieve wholeness and peace by recognizing and bringing into consciousness conflicts that need to be resolved. Linhares’ process is set in motion by making conflicts visible, working with the idea of opposing elements—abstract and figurative, light and dark, conscious and unconscious.

With roots in abstract painting, Linhares’ work reconsiders the expressive possibilities in figuration and narrative. She uses her observation and formal skills to imagine a realm of her own making through layered brush gestures that fill the composition, expressing monumentality and directness. What often emerges are long-limbed, nude figures and wild animals that coexist in a kaleidoscope of colors, liberated from logic or expectation. The women, sometimes represented in groups, own their real estate. They are not posing for the viewer but are more likely to be involved in personal reverie, possessing the agency to climb, lounge, eat, and exist as they please.

Accompanying these paintings, items from the artist’s studio, including collected objects, photographs, and journals, parallel to specific imagery and temperaments in the works, allowing us to imagine how these multifarious elements were transposed by Linhares. Linhares’ creative catalysts go beyond the studio space, as well, and into the greater dialogue and history of artmaking. Recognizing the importance of artist-to-artist communication, the exhibition highlights the works of five artists: Bill Adams, Ellen Berkenblit, Karin Davie, Dona Nelson, and Mary Jo Vath. Each artist represents a unique approach, with strong commitments to physical processes and explorations within representation and abstraction. The inclusion of these five artists serves to underscore their individual differences while reflecting Linhares’ common interests in the power of an intuitive process.

The range of paintings in this exhibition reflects Linhares’ interests in narrative as a form of personal revelation, as in psychoanalysis or the so-called “talking cure”—the desire to Installation view of Judith Linhares’ Cave, Photo : Ryan Gamma

Installation view of Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator, Photo: Ryan Gamma

Bay Area Beginnings Judith Linhares came of age in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area during the decades of civil and social unrest, experimentation, and challenge to authority. The search for greater “freedom” defined that moment in time. Like most artists of her generation, Linhares’ training was largely formal. Early on, she developed a respect for abstract art, specifically the work of the Abstract Expressionists and their desire to jettison many of the limitations of European representational art. The rise of second-wave feminism in the 1970s began to shed light on how women had been represented in works of art. Art historians John Berger and Linda Nochlin were instrumental in revealing the built-in bias in Western art that privileges the “male gaze.” What also became apparent was the lack of acknowledgment women received for their contributions as makers of culture. Many talents were excluded from the story of art—not just women—and anyone who existed outside of Western art traditions was seen and experienced as “other.”

Installation view of Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator, Photo: Ryan Gamma

Judith Linhares, Blaze, 2003-2004, Oil on linen, 51 x 78 in., Hall Collection

Stories We Tell Ourselves Judith Linhares has recorded her dreams in journals for more than fifty years. Rather than using the journals as direct sources for imagery in her paintings, they are a way of charting how her mind works when dreaming—piecing together past and present, loss and joy, envy and generosity, desire and rejection. Stories We Tell Ourselves includes dream journal entries and a group of spontaneous gouache images. Both text and gouache paintings were made by Linhares in an effort to stay in contact with the flow of her inner life.

Installation view of Stories We Tell Ourselves, Photo: Ryan Gamma

Judith Linhares, Red, gouache on paper, 10 x 7 in., Courtesy of the artist

Judith Linhares, Dream 1976, ink on paper, 7 1/2 x 9 1/2 in., Courtesy of the artist

Installation view of Judith Linhares’ Carry On and Slope, Photo: Ryan Gamma

Judith Linhares, Tigress, 2009, Oil on linen, 57 x 60 in., Hall Collection

Installation view of Judith Linhares’ Stir and Picnic Rock, Photo: Ryan Gamma

Installation view of Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator, Photo: Ryan Gamma

19 Judith Linhares in her studio, Photo: Amanda Marie Mason

21 Various studio items, Photo: Ryan Gamma

The Artist as Curator Linhares: “I welcome the opportunity to share the stage here with my fellow artist. The value of the artist-to-artist community has not been fully acknowledged. The connection between artists through social contact and formalized meetings has helped me clarify my own thinking. It is not about being influenced necessary, but with an art form as old and known as painting, we are all standing on someone’s shoulders. The now mythical model of the artist struggling alone in their garrets is not the full story and is a little out of date. The real story about how artists learn to make the work they need to make happens over time developing skills, cosmologies, philosophies, and whatever it takes to stay focused on their pursuit. This process is not about having a fixed destination, but more about a search that is open to change. Seeing other artists’ work in the studio or in the museum helps me think about what I am doing with my work. This can certainly be a wide range of artists – from century’s old masters to friends in my own community. I have known the artists included in this exhibition and witnessed each of their unique paths over a period of twenty years or more. Their work takes different forms—free-standing paintings, shaped canvases, drawings, painting and ceramics, small and intimate works to large and aggressive works. What they have in common is a process that risks failure. The end product was not completely known in advance. They all have developed confidence through learning skills and disciplined thinking to arrive at their unique perspectives. I find their commitment to their work, the clarity of their thinking, and the presence and experience of their works encouraging for my development as an artist.”

Installation view of Mary Jo Vath’s works in Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator, Photo: Ryan Gamma

Mary Jo Vath, Monkey Hat, 2015, Oil on canvas, 15 ¼ x 15 ¼ in., Courtesy of the artist

Mary Jo Vath Mary Jo Vath (b. 1957, Illinois) has dedicated her painting practice to thorough examination and “re-presentation” of everyday objects that have been overlooked, abandoned, and dismissed. After staging the object in a neutral space in her studio, Vath intensely scrutinizes the object, painting almost completely from observation. This steadfast observation bridges the greater, common understanding of the object and the artist’s unconscious perceptions, through which Vath realizes the individual and actual reality of the object. The final work presents not only the object’s true being but also its symbolic meaning. Linhares: “Mary Jo Vath is the one artist in this group that works only from observation. She chooses common subjects—flowers, fruit, table settings—while also embracing elements from mass culture. Vath chooses her subjects carefully, looking for what speaks to her in random encounters at the Salvation Army or a public market in Mexico. I share with Mary Jo the idea that there is something to be learned in the practice of sitting in front of a single object or group of objects and trying to record what you see. Anyone who has tried this knows you see things differently every time you look away and return your gaze to the chosen items. There is always slippage between what you know and what you are able to see at a chosen distance. The power of Mary Jo’s paintings is not that they are so real—it is more so that she can take a subject, like a blue wig or a cheap winter hat, and imbue it with magic. I believe this happens in her almost devotional relationship with the chosen subject. There is nothing mechanical in her process. Every inch of the painting is arrived at through intense coming together between hand and mind.”

Ellen Berkenblit, Tiger Fur Umbrella, 2019, Oil, paintstick, and charcoal on calico, 53 x 55 ¼ in. Courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York

Ellen Berkenblit Ellen Berkenblit’s (b. 1958, New Jersey) paintings do not foreground meaning or interpretation— each work is rather an exploration of line, color, surface, and composition. Certain symbols, such as the figure of a young girl or a leopard, do not have assigned meaning, whereas others infiltrate Berkenblit’s paintings from lived experience, such as stoplights and trucks. These symbols are not pre-planned, although they persist across paintings. Their presence emerges through Berkenblit’s transfer of energy from unconscious, to paint, to canvas. Without hesitation, Berkenblit builds on layers of painted color and form until the final image appears. This full embrace of the painting process is physical, honest, and limitless. Linhares: “Ellen Berkenblit’s development as an artist has held special interest for me—starting from small, intimate drawings that reflect the vocabulary of cartooning. Berkenblit uses an abbreviated graphic language to depict an invented character with idealized features—a kind of Cinderella character in conversation with a cartoon cat. Her paintings evolved into challenging physical wonders that have great monumentality and power. The paintings in this exhibition are a variety of sizes—from very large to small—and are made with paint that has a specific and luxuriant physicality. I was immediately attracted to Berkenblit’s work for her mixing of references, vernacular cartoons, and the use of her invented language to make complete compositions that are not didactic but ambiguous and open to interpretation. I am very interested in how she uses color to create a sense of an urban environment.”

Installation view of Ellen Berkenblit’s works in Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator, Photo: Ryan Gamma

Installation view of Bill Adams’ works in Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator, Photo: Ryan Gamma

Installation view of Bill Adams’ Benny in the Afternoon (2), Benny in the Afternoon, At Sea, and Longhair, Photo: Ryan Gamma

Bill Adams Bill Adams’ (b. 1957, New York) multidisciplinary practice includes drawing, painting, and most recently, sculpture. While the works differ in material and appearance, they are united through Adams’ improvisational process. Curiously, what results from the artist’s spontaneous actions is a coexistence between works, a shared essence suggested by the unspoken language between characters. Adams describes these characters, most often animals, as Rorschach readouts of his own psychologies. The artist’s raw, unmediated energy, transferred from hands to object, can be felt in the frenzied, spirited lines and forms of these works. Linhares: “I share with Bill and Ellen the use of animals as subjects. Adams’ animals, like Berkenblit’s, seem to exhibit very human qualities through body language and facial expression. Adams has left the option open to use other materials besides paint and brushes. Adams’ clay sculpture has all the presence and power and immediacy that his drawings have. I love the spontaneity and all the information he brings to his subjects. His work does not express doubt but captures those all too fleeting moments that express total belief and confidence. Adams is an avid tennis player and compares his process to the concentration that is required in a tennis match. I think this is a complicated process that requires practice and rehearsal. Adams does not burden the viewer by showing the searching part of his process. His process shares something with acting and a spirit of play. Adams and I share the idea that painting and sculpture offer a unique opportunity to express the unison of body and mind and the spirit of play.”

Dona Nelson, Studio Portrait Over Time, 2016, Cheesecloth, muslin, painted string and acrylic mediums on linen, Base: 38 x 32 in. (Panels: 81 x 35 ½ in. each), Private Collection, Courtesy of Thomas Erben Gallery, New York

Dona Nelson The paintings of Dona Nelson (b. 1947, Nebraska) defy designation and convention—they are both flat surfaces and three-dimensional objects; abstract and figurative; spontaneous and contemplative. Nelson’s painting process is constantly evolving and flexible, much like the possibilities of the materials she works with. The works exhibited here exemplify Nelson’s two-sided paintings. In 2003, while working on a painting in the middle of a field in New Jersey, pouring paint and scrubbing and hosing the canvas with water, Nelson noticed that the colors bleeding through the canvas created a different image and color palette on the back side of the canvas. This happenchance inspired her two-sided paintings. Nelson’s creative process continues to be guided by unplanned events that occur in the course of making a painting. Paint, cheesecloth, muslin, and string act as equal parts to create texture, mass, and color. The final work often evolves over several months, emerging out of simultaneity of thought and ever-present, ever-changing, material facticity. Linhares: “Dona Nelson’s work has combined figuration and abstraction from the beginning. I find her work courageous and exhilarating. Her commitment to process over premeditation is allconsuming. The chances she takes are heroic—she has ripped painting off the wall where it has been comfortably sitting for centuries and made it stand on its own in the room. The thinking involved in Nelson’s processes includes the history of twentieth-century art and the preoccupation with making a work feel as though it is always expressing a sense of Now. Nelson readily acknowledges her continued dialogue with Jackson Pollock and the act of pouring and dripping. She also adds to this piercing, cutting, folding, as well as observational drawing. All these methods, as options for making a painting, end in a remarkable sense of order and presence.” 33

Installation view of Dona Nelson’s works in Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator, Photo: Ryan Gamma

Installation view of Karin Davie’s works in Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator, Photo: Ryan Gamma

Karin Davie, In The Metabolic no 7, 2020, Oil on linen over shaped stretcher, 63 x 60 x 1 ½ in., Courtesy of the artist

Karin Davie Karin Davie’s (b. 1965, Canada) paintings extend the tradition of gestural abstraction and combine it with optical styles rooted in the 1960s and 1970s. The works have a conviction in the formal language of painting, and, at the same time, they embody the painter’s persona. They are humorous, lyrical, and autobiographical. Information is woven together from both the external and internal world to create a dynamic field of exchange between representation and abstraction. These paintings embrace contradiction and are rich in associations. In Davie’s most recent series, In the Metabolic, While My Painting Gently Weeps, and Beam Me Up (Small), the artist has transformed the stripe motif from earlier work into rhythmic fields of wavy strokes. The conventional square or rectangle is subtly undermined by creating “intrusions” derived from shapes traced from Davie’s own body (thumb, elbows, knees) or fracturing the center of an image using the canvas’s edge. In these works, formal relationships dissolve the barrier between inside/outside and object/illusion. With an emphasis on color and unbroken, mimetic gestures, Davie works to engage us in a realm, both optical and physical. The paintings’ luminosity and motion pull the viewer into their pervading mood, sense of mystery, erotism, and quiet tension. Linhares: “Karin Davie is an imaginative inventor and problem-solver working from multiple angles to make works that often hover between painting and object, abstract and representational—often leaving the conventional rectangle behind until she arrives at the right combination of color, form, brushstroke, and support. The effect has emotional resonance and physical beauty that is unique and at the same time has universal and irresistible appeal. Davie has explored the effects of color, light, and materiality, inventing images that are in constant motion. The more recent paintings have a kind of repeated movement reminiscent of a beating heart. She is endlessly tenacious in pursuit of her vision, willing to experiment with paint, brush, material, and color until she gets all the elements working in unison. I have been in regular conversation with Davie for nearly thirty years. Karin Davie has extraordinary clarity of thought and talking with her is always encouraging, productive, and inspiring.” 37

The Artist’s Studio The artist’s studio has long been veiled in fascination and myth as a private nexus where the artist devotes themselves to the most honest form of personal expression. It is the ultimate site of artistic creation and has constantly been reinvented as a response to evolving modes of making. The function itself has changed, from a workroom (bottega), to study (studiolo), to reflective space, as well as the setting, from a traditional European-style studio, to a loft, to even outdoors (en plein air). Despite where or how the studio exists, it is the origin of a work of art and thus, where the work of art is most aligned with its true essence. These five artists have granted us access to their studios, repositioning the studio as a mythic, concealed territory to a place where we can garner a deeper appreciation and understanding of the artist’s process and psyche. In some of these studios, artworks lean against the wall, while others on easels; some focus on a few works, while others many at once; and some are sprawling, while others more intimate. The studio is a trace, a reflection, a sign, a carrier of meaning and context, and it is distinctive of the artist, much like the work conceived there.

Installation view of Artist Studios in Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator, Photo: Ryan Gamma

Judith Linhares, Woodpecker, 1985, Oil on linen, 48 x 36 in. Collection of Brooks Adams

The Labyrinth of Judith Linhares by Brooks Adams Originally published in Dangerous Pleasures: The Art of Judith Linhares (University Art Gallery, Sonoma State University, February 23 – March 27, 1994) For fourteen years, I have lived surrounded by the strange paintings of Judith Linhares. The first to arrive was a large gouache (1980) of an ink-blue sea and a chartreuse sky, with a foetal fisherman fishing from a tree, a siren pouring water from her rock, and a zaftig mermaid reclining under a parasol in the deep. Linhares’ painting has always tapped into my affection for Symbolist art—for those ineffable feelings of drowning and rebirth, desolation and quasi-mystical redemption that I tend to associate with masters such as Hodler and Munch, Gauguin and Ensor. Fresh out of graduate school, circa 1980, I also remember thinking how much Linhares’ aquatic imagery recalled the Swiss artist Arnold Bocklin’s late 19th century paintings of frolicking tritons and sirens. Bocklin’s hallucinatory transformations of Basel burgermeisters into sirens and sphinxes, not to mention humanoid fish and fowl, were just the 1

things to whet my appetite for this California visionary whose seemingly trance-induced paintings conveyed a similar enchantment, and sense of the macabre, about late 20thcentury America. The next Linhares to enter my life was Woodpecker (1984). The colossal bird is painted a deep oneiric blue suggestive of pottery glazes, and is set against a brownish-yellow ground that evokes a funky, Wild West look of burnished leather. The woodpecker, I learned from Linhares, was based on a dream she had had about attending a cocktail party at my apartment, which at that point she had never actually seen. In the dream, she said, she was “being served some really strange cocktail dip, while woodpeckers were heard hammering away out on the balcony.”1 The painted woodpecker with its cyclopean eye—like Max Ernst’s Loplop,

Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from conversations with the artist, April 1992 to October 1993.

it is a hieratic and somewhat predatory, if ultimately benign bird—has since become a surrogate portrait of the art historian-turnedcritic, its owner.

At the time, the critic-impresario Dan Cameron referred to Linhares as “she of the bulbous heads and the white magic, the earth-sky dichotomies and wavering phantasms.”2

A couple of years later I stalked a large gouache called Limbo Zombies (1986) which I recognized immediately to be one of Linhares’ masterpieces. It is a haunted, postapocalyptic landscape of gray rocks, severed heads and phallic tree trunks, through which a small struggler’s army of oddly delicate, one-eyed creatures makes its way— tiny mutant arms outstretched, as if in search of some connection with another being. This big painting on paper, along with other works by Linhares, was shown in 1986 at an East Village gallery known as Mo David, which was run by the artist Mike Osterhout. This was during the last gasp of the neobohemian East Village scene, and Linhares was lionized by younger artists and critics alike as a sort of talismanic figure of authority on everything defiant, weird and witchy about figurative art. (Starting in 1982, Linhares also showed at the Concord Gallery in Soho, whose director, Ragland Watkins, initially paired her work with that of Haim Steinbach.)

By the early ‘90s, Linhares’ imagery had become more abstract and ambiguous. For example, I have never quite figured out whether Amazon, the darkly luminous gouache that came to me in 1991, was conceived as a vindictive or a redemptive allegory. All I know is that its central image—the figure of a bug-headed woman standing like a gondolier who stabs, or stirs, a pile of large, parti-colored balls with her trident—has an intense, testicular energy. A few of these orbs are specifically defined as eyeballs, once again affirming the importance of the cyclopean leitmotif in Linhares’ oeuvre. The exaggerated anatomies, and the South of the Border palette of citrus yellows, magenta and orange against black are also reminiscent of Rufino Tamayo, as well as the less well-known Brazilian artist, Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973), a woman modernist whose work of the 1920’s closely resembles Linhares: Amaral’s remarkably intense paintings of figures with tiny heads and swollen limbs were a high point of the 1993 exhibition Latin American

See Dan Cameron, “Judith Linhares Weaves a Spell,” Arts Magazine, vol. 60, no. 4, December 1985, pp. 76-79.

Artists of the Twentieth Century at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. With Amazon, indeed as always, Linhares established herself as a vanguardist in the reassessment of the Mexican influence and spirit in modern art. In fact, for three months in 1976 she lived in the silver city of Guanajuato, where she found herself in contact with the continuing, living power of such rituals as the Day of the Dead. There, she became engrossed by the museum of the 19th-century cadavers “with heads that look like pumpkins in the fields when they’ve collapsed?” She also took to making small black and white gouache studies that enabled her to get the tonal values— what might be called the sol y sombra of her compositions—just right, before proceeding with her characteristic, blisteringly bright, sun-baked and moon-stewed colors. As we have become increasingly aware, in recent years, of the legacy of Mexican modernism, it has become clear that Linhares’ work connects to an alternate lineage formed by such powerful female avatars as Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington— who, through her relationship to Max Ernst, provides yet another link to the bird Loplop.

With their quirky yet rather finite personal iconographies, however, and their odd, lapidary, Old Masterish styles, these artists do not stand before Linhares as predecessors in any direct formal sense, but as pioneers along the visionary route, the redemptive path less often taken by artists this century. Coming as she did from the West Coast— and indeed, from the highly particular school of the 1960s and the ‘70s San Francisco Bay Area figuration—Linhares was uniquely posed, at the onset of the ‘80s, to introduce the tenets of contemporary Symbolism, based in large part on Jungian dream imagery and Surrealist automatism, to a New York art world hungry once again for painting. Her espousal of personal, domestic and mythic subject matter coincided with an important shift away from Conceptualism towards the heated imagery and fervent iconography of what was generally referred to as Neo-Expressionism. Linhares was certainly no American-girl incarnation of the German and decidedly boyish Neue Wilden painters, whose typically brashlooking canvases had suddenly become ubiquitous. By 1980, the year she arrived in New York (after a brief

teaching stint in Louisiana where she met her current companion, the mazemaker-poet Stephen Spretjnak), Linhares was already an established West Coast master with a spectacularly pellucid gouache technique. Her work had been represented in a number of group exhibitions, including the defiantly titled Bad Painting show at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, in 1978, and, in spite of the show’s title, it was in fact anything but unskilled. One Bad Painting inclusion, Linhares’ bewitched Turkey (1977), of a magisterial and multi-hued bird alongside the dwarfed figure of a colonial infanta, was already the stuff of legend in certain circles by the time I first approached the artist, in 1980, in order to select a group of her gouaches for a section that I was putting together of the P.S. 1 exhibition, Watercolors. To the eyes of many New Yorkers at that time, Linhares’ art seemed extremely peculiar—cryptic and quizzical and open to revery, rather than brazenly selfassertive and macho like so much of the new German and American painting of the period. It was almost as if Linhares herself had dropped down into Lower Manhattan from the sky, like an apparition in a Magic Realist novel, or like one of her own voodooish insects or mythic birds.

In fact the origins of Linhares’ style may clearly be traced to the artist’s California roots. Born Judith Wood in Pasadena in 1940, she was raised in a Southern Californian atmosphere of what she describes as “bodybuilders and bikers,” and a familial structure of “total matriarchy.” The artist grew up with her grandmother in the sleepy towns of Newhall and Hermosa Beach until Linhares was 13. Her mother was an X-ray technician who supported the family and who also worked out at Muscle Beach. Her father had been a policeman, last seen when the artist was six. The artist remembers reading the Bible as a child with her grandmother, and loving pirate movies (“with Maureen O’ Hara lashed to the mast of a ship”), as well as feature-length Walt Disney cartoons such as Snow White and Pinocchio. Indeed, one of Linhares’ early ambitions was to become an animation artist, and skewed cartoon figures—from earthy moocows to ornery goslings—are frequently evident in her mature work. (In 1970, while a graduate student at the California College of Arts and Crafts, she presented a short animated film titled Swan Song as her M.F.A. thesis, rather than an art history paper. This work may readily be understood as a bridge between the artist’s early

interest in animation, and the cartoonish element in her later paintings.) As a teenager, Linhares moved in with her mother, who had remarried and was living in Manhattan Beach, and took the name of her stepfather, Coe. Throughout her adolescence she defined herself as Judith Coe, artist and “poet groupie,” and hung out in the mystically-minded, beatnik world of Malibu Beach. As a young teenager she knew Wallace Berman, the tiny local visionary artist who also wore a boy scout uniform. She saw his show of assemblages and protoXerox art that he called “verifaxes,” and that was closed by the police on charges of obscenity, at the Ferus Gallery in 1957. During the late ‘50s, she also greatly admired work by the California assemblagist Bruce Conner. For Linhares, these artists would forever define artistic risk-taking and bohemianism—concepts that she has always adhered to. In 1958 at 17 she moved to Oakland and, at 19, married a young art student, Phil Linhares, who later became an influential Bay Area curator and organized the first Hairy Who show at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1968. With Linhares, she had a daughter, Amanda, in 1960.

Until 1963 Linhares’ paintings were abstract, but she was looking at work on either side of the Maginot Line of representation, by such Bay Area artists as David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Richard Diebenkorn, as well as DeKooning, Pollock and Guston, which she had first encountered the decade before at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Guston’s late-in-life return to figuration also proved to be an inspiration for her own ‘80s imagist style. But abstraction remains a constant in Linhares’ process. Each work since 1976 and the artist’s Mexican sojourn has started off as an abstract field of color—a phase she describes as “moving light around the canvas,” often in tonally contrasting, complementary color schemes. Only gradually does she pull a specific subject up from what she calls “my pool of images.” Then she proceeds to inflect, and re-inflect, what is at base something quite like a gestural abstraction, slowly bringing it into a latter-day realm of representation. In San Francisco, Linhares’ affinities and friendships were legion.3 Peter Saul’s series of “Vietnam” paintings, for example, made a big impression on her when they were exhibited

For more on this context, see Whitney Chadwick, “Narrative Imagism and the Figurative Tradition in Northern California Painting,” The Art Journal, vol. 45, no. 4, Winter 1985, pp. 309-314.

at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1968. She hung out with James Albertson, the prototypical “Bad” painter (whose work was also in the New Museum show) and whose “Jack and Jill” paintings, as well as his phantasmagoric works based on the children’s prayer “Now I lay me down to sleep,” have strong resonances in Linhares’ ‘80s painting. She was also on friendly terms with the epochal cartoonist R. Crumb, along with a whole circle of cartoon artists that included Spain Rodriguez and S. Clay Wilson. (Crumb’s bulbous, eschatological style would later influence both Guston and Linhares’ swollen-headed anatomies.) Linhares admired the artist and Batman Gallery proprietor Wally Hedrick, and became friends with his wife, the painter Jay De Feo, whose 300-pound, thickly impastoed painting The Rose, 15 years in the making, made a formidable impression on her. What she loved about Hedrick was his “archetypal, ‘I don’t give a shit’ attitude,” as well as works such as an American flag painting that was shown in the Sixteen Americans show at The Museum of Modern Art in 1959 along with works by De Feo, Jasper Johns, and Frank Stella’s “Black Paintings.” Hedrick’s limnerish, roadside style was a signpost in Linhares’ development, and in 1994 she showed with him 46

at Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco, her principal dealer since 1976. (Also during her San Francisco period, beginning in 1963, Linhares made three-dimensional constructions, such as a table covered in velvet or a vitrine with a skeleton figure, using kitschy materials like rhinestones, and a floral shower curtain that she cut up and transformed into a relief element composed of translucent layers. One such piece, a fragile but functioning, free-standing lamp construction from 1971 titled Swan Song is in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modem Art.) Also between the early ‘60s and ‘70s, Linhares became intimately acquainted with a whole category of cultural production typically grouped under the rubric of Outsider Art. As she explained in a letter to Barbara Freeman, the research curator of the 1993 exhibition Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: “During the ‘60s, I worked with physically and/or mentally disabled artists and observed the making of inspiring work. I was fortunate to gather a nice collection of their drawings, paintings on paper and ceramic works. At the same time, I shared in an interest in outside art with my ex-husband Phil Linhares. He collected, supported and brought to the

public’s attention the art of many outsiders. I own a Joseph Yoakum, a B.J. Newton, and a Howard Finster... I was aware through the ‘60s and the ‘70s of outsider artists like Gaston Duf, Scottie Wilson, and Martin Ramirez through books and some good private collections such as those of Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson. My particular interests are P. M. Wentworth and Joseph Yoakum for their sense of imaginary travel and for Wentworth’s invented space and sense of weightlessness.”4 It is indeed easy to understand how a work on paper such as Wentworth’s Moon (1952)—a mournful manin-the-moon face, overdrawn with a welter of landscape motifs and figurative incidents— strongly appealed to Linhares, whose vision so often extends to the lunar aspects. Through her friendships with Deven Golden, an artist who first defended Linhares’ work in 1980 when she exhibited with him at the Nancy Lurie Gallery in Chicago, her commitment to Outsider Art was intensified still further, for Golden showed much of this work when he was a writer and curator at the Chicago Cultural Center.5 As we can see, Linhares’ perspectives have consistently been “Other”—certainly, at least, vis-a-vis the dominant, New York-centered, Pop

and Minimalist idioms of the period. The artist, however, dates her mature work only as far back as 1971, when she was teaching in San Jose, California, where, according to the artist, all of her students were MexicanAmericans and Vietnam vets. “They were 26, and I was 31,” she remembers. “They were all lapsed Catholics, and I showed them Buñuel movies, which they loved.” She found San Jose to be “a breath of fresh air, with a real grit to it, after the precious and gentrified atmosphere of San Francisco.” And it was in this auspicious climate that she soon made a signal series of black-and-white ink drawings that formed her first solo show—at the Berkeley Gallery in San Francisco, in 1972. With their spiky, linear markings and spectral imagery, including skeletons in aprons, these drawings immediately recall the Aubrey Beardsley-on-acid style of a lot of graphic design from that period—Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom concert posters, for instance—but also work by the early 20th-century Mexican graphic genius, Jose Guadalupe Posada, whose satirical broadsides once helped mobilize an entire nation for revolution, and remain potently mordant today. Most memorable in this bristling series is Linhares’ Self-Portrait as Van Gogh

From an unpublished letter by Judith Linhares to Barbara Freeman, 1990. P. M. Wentworth’s Moon is reproduced in Maurice Tuchman and Carol S. Eliel, Parallel Visions: Modem Artists and Outsider Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1992, p. 164 & 170. 5

(1971), in which the artist appears in strict Renaissance profile, wearing a chenille dress with raveled sleeves, wielding a big knife, and holding a rather large, freshly severed ear as if a saintly attribute. In addition to the traditional romance of the artistic suffering that all such as Van Goghrelated iconography inevitably implies, this image was meant to evoke self-portraits by the 17th-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi who, along with many other women artists long ignored in standard textbooks, was beginning to enjoy a resurgence in the early ‘70s, thanks to the groundbreaking efforts of feminist scholars such as Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris. The shock value that Linhares’ self-image held at the time should not be underestimated, for with it the artist found herself in the midst of what was undeniably a new vanguard— indeed a social as well as esthetic revolution. It is worth noting that much of Linhares’ early exhibition history involves all-women group shows, and it was within this highly charged atmosphere of personal affirmation and group consciousness-raising that she became friends with other women artists then in the Bay Area, including M. Louise Stanley, Janis Provisor

and Judith Hudson. They were all engaged in eccentric forms of figuration, or of landscapebased abstraction, which would over the next two decades evolve into powerfully idiosyncratic painterly visions, at odds with the prevailing discourse of the day. During the early ‘70s, an emphasis on selfconsciously “female” content—on pretty, corny or sentimental imagery, on the esthetic of “women’s work” and the handmade—was certainly not unique to Linhares and her immediate circle. The curtained canvases with bows, and the festooned and beribboned birthday-party style installations of the late Ree Morton are perhaps the classic case in point. But even a consummately girlish drawing such as Linhares’ A Stitch in Time (1974), with its meticulous moon and starry skies over water, pointillist swan silhouette and bird’s nest with eggs, and trompe-l’oeil palimpsests of scattered feathers and furled black ribbon, convey a deepening feeling of identification with nocturnal subjects, and especially, with birds. The artist’s Symbolist affinities are indeed more explicit in this work than even in her student Swan Song film, or than in earlier gouache, Bird (1971), whose

upside-down avian image and funereal swags convey a similarly poetic melancholy. It was, however, in the years following her 1976 Mexican sojourn that all the various components of Linhares’ long, searching apprenticeship— the autobiographical imagery, the Jungian dreamscapes and psychoanalytic findings, the Surrealist methods, the Outsider Art influences, and the artist’s education in the ways and means of post-war abstraction—coalesced into a mature style. Linhares’ 1977 Turkey was her watershed, the first work that she considers to have been a successful synthesis of the narrative and painterly. The residue of an intense experience of Mexico is instantly apparent in the clarion colors and blaring iconicity of this painting, not to mention the stiff posture and regional costume of the little doll figure. Only slightly less obvious but no less important, is the powerful new message of elemental fusion —a bold mix of forces female and male, animal and human—that the work projects. This is surely the overwhelming lesson of the fantastic, hybrid culture of Mexico, and to young Linhares, the Bay Area feminist, it must have seemed a great key to many of the riddles posed by her more tentative and parochial efforts

up to that point. The bird’s spread of plumage, of course, is itself both an elaborate fan—the symbol of female coquetry in Latin cultures, and a motif explored by Linhares and many other artists, from Ellen Phelan and Nancy Graves to Miriam Shapiro, during the highfeminist early and middle ‘70s—as well as the signal display tactic of the male bird. In the artist’s now expanded worldview, birds are sure heralds of visionary allegorical content. In 1984, for instance, as a kind of pendant to the woodpecker painting that I so strongly identify with, Linhares painted Shaded Torso, an unforgettable, charismatic vision of a headless female body fused, at shoulder level, to a tree trunk, wherein we sense somehow that we are virtually inside the woman’s anatomy, miraculously privy to some unfathomable metabolic transformation. Next, to combine the motifs of the bird and the female, as well as to broaden her already loose frame of mythological references, she essayed the large and ambitious Woman and Woodpecker (1984), a canvas inflected by so bright a dash of red, and saturated by a saffron yellow so intense as to suggest the powder pigments of Moghul miniatures. (The shape

Judith Linhares, Woman with Woodpecker, 1983 Oil on canvas, 96 13/16 x 78 7/16 in., Collection of Teresa Bourke

and physiognomy of the seated female figure also have a Southeast Asian cast to them, suggestive of Cambodian temple sculpture.) This beatific, sylvan Woman and Woodpecker— the centerpiece, in 1985, of Linhares’ room in the P.S. 1 exhibition Ripe Fruit, curated by Lisa Liebmann—was followed by Annunciation (1986), a nocturnal and altogether foreboding work in which a recessive, inchoate female form ensconced in a rock, is pictorially dominated by a big, one-eyed, bile-green woodpecker stuck to the trunk of the thick-barked tree. Over the course of the ‘80s, Linhares became an expert painter of arboreal skin—bark being at once an ideal locus for painterly experiments in tone and texture, and an ideal focus for the artist’s own particular form of tree worship. In the two woman-woodpecker-and-tree paintings, Linhares furthermore achieves a thoroughly quirky, syncretic blend of Christian and preColumbian mythologies. In both works, implied outright annunciation motifs (winged being to the left, female figure to the right, etc.) are inextricably combined with iconographic elements pertaining to ancient Meso-American lore—stories, for example, documented by

Claude Levi-Strauss, among others, in which woodpeckers are able to predict the sex of unborn babies. It may or may not be an indication of greater personal and creative contentment that in recent years Linhares has increasingly shifted her sights away from oceans and forest and their untamable forces, in favor of more pastoral farmlands. In 1987 she and Stephen Spretjnak bought a Victorian farmhouse in Leonardsville, New York, in the so-called Leatherstocking region near Cooperstown where they spend most of every summer, and this new setting surely contributed to Linhares’ more bucolic point of view. With a work such as Chick (1990), for instance, a large gouache in which a gangling, bright-yellow birdling ambles down a country road strewn with skulls and bones, beneath a purplish sky, the artist’s early Disneyesque affinities are again clearly apparent, even if combined with elements of a rather more apocalyptic vision. Likewise, what might seem a familiar cast of characters— including Cupid and Psyche, Jack and Jill, along with a peaceable kingdom full of horses, cows, dogs, cats, squirrels, cheetahs and sphinxes, beekeepers and bees—are subject to mutation

in Linhares’ anthropomorphic lexicon, becoming ever more interchangeable, hydrocephalic, heedless of taxonomical status. With these barnyard allegories we are, as well, more distinctly reminded of the abstract origins of each of the artist’s images. It is almost as if Linhares’ nursery-rhyme figures were all headed towards harmonic convergence at some unmapped point of ultimate abstraction: the essential oneness of all subject-matter. In the ‘90s, however, a surprising motif surfaces in Linhares’ work, bringing with it the suggestion of a new social vision. While the motif of clasped or reaching hands is not in itself entirely new for the artist—it appears at least once before, in one of her most introspective images, the womblike Gold Torso of 1984 (Frederick R. Weisman Collection; not in this exhibition)—the earlier connotation was of rapt, monadic interiority. The thick fingers, for example of Gold Torso, are laced over the figure’s stomach, as if to hold it in or shield it. But in 1992, after a semester of teaching at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, and of living in the desert not far from the towns where she grew up, Linhares returned

to New York. As if to celebrate this reunion with friends and urban society, she painted Corn, a subject redolent of Mexico, and a work that evokes no less a monument to the collectivist spirit than Diego Rivera’s epic cycle depicting the history of the Aztec people—a series of murals made between 1923 and 1928 and permanently installed at the Ministry of Education in Mexico City. In Linhares’ painting, four hands seen from above enter the picture plane at the top and bottom edges of the canvas, to reach for ears of corn from a small heap in the middle of the flat, if lushly rendered, wood-grained surface of a table-top. It is a quintessential allegory of community, analogous to any scene of villagers breaking bread. Absent in this picture, furthermore, are the fervid chartreuses and moody, boundless ultramarines for which Linhares is so well known. Instead we find discrete local tones, quite literally applied, including maizeyellow of course, along with the sober gray and brownish hues of proletarian realism and everyday life. There is in fact something decidedly old-fashioned about Corn, a whiff of the W.P.A.

By 1993 and a work called Thinking, Linhares had taken the hands motif one step further, and with it this new mood of retrospection, communality and thanks. A very small but densely worked painting reminiscent of late Guston, Thinking contains the single image of a pair of ruddy worker’s hands clasped as if in an act of prayer—maybe to a lone God, but possibly to deities more atavistic, such as gods of rain or of the harvest. The picture packs an unmistakable primordial punch. It is too tempting here not to suggest that in revisiting the arid zones of her childhood, Linhares may have been reminded of the actualities of agriculture, hard labor and the elements, as well as of bible sessions with her grandmother. These memories, in turn, may indeed have gotten her thinking about an era even further back in time, past her childhood, to the period of the Great Depression, which is when the Abstract Expressionist generation and the artists that she first studied with were themselves learning to paint. In addition to Rivera’s more exotic vision of muscular socialism, we sense in works like Corn and Thinking the spirit of hardscrabble, plainspoken Americanness, and the distant presence of such artists as

Thomas Hart Benton, who was Jackson Pollock’s first mentor, and the regionalist Grant Wood. The artist Linhares has, through her work to date, realized an arc spanning a huge array of personal, psychological, political, (multi) cultural and spiritual, as well as formal points of interest and delectation. In her strange, luminous, hardwon pictorial universe, seemingly obdurate contradictions are loosened up and reconciled. A rigorous feminism, for instance, co-exists with an almost beatific universalism; a Californian funkiness has been cut with the tonic, anxious glare of New York; a puritanical core of strict abstraction lurks within a climate of emotional and imagistic fervor worthy of a Mexican shrine; and an incipient, recession-flavored, grass-roots populism is at once animated by a Matissean joy in color, and tempered by an inherently effete Symbolist style. In fact, with Linhares as our model, it would seem that at the muchanticipated turn of this exhausted millennium, a woman artist of uncommon vision is duty-bound to try and see a lot more than is readily apparent in the world, and to process it all.

Exhibition Checklist Judith Linhares Judith Linhares, Cave, 2010, Oil on linen, 54 x 72 x 1 1/2 in. Collection of Beth Lee and Adam Lloyd Beckerman Judith Linhares, Woman with Woodpecker, 1983, Oil on canvas, 96 13/16 x 78 7/16 in. Collection of Teresa Bourke Judith Linhares, Sphinx, 1990, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 54 x 78 in. Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody Judith Linhares, Animal Nature, 2019, Oil on canvas, 50 x 68 in. Collection of Ricardo Martinez Judith Linhares, Stories We Tell Ourselves, Dates variable, Journal entries and gouache on paper, Dimensions variable, Courtesy of the artist Judith Linhares, Blaze, 2003-2004, Oil on linen, 51 x 78 in. Hall Collection Judith Linhares, Down by the River, 2018, Oil on linen, 60 x 53 in. Collection of Joey Soloway Judith Linhares, Cove, 2010, Oil on linen, 60 x 81 in. Collection of Chris Birchby Judith Linhares, Tigress, 2009, Oil on linen, 57 x 60 in. Hall Collection Judith Linhares, Carry On, 2010, Oil on linen, 81 x 54 in. Courtesy of the artist

Judith Linhares, Slope, 2011, Oil on linen, 60 x 84 in. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Museum purchase with funds from the International and Contemporary Collectors, with additional support provided by Joan and Irwin Jacobs, Sheryl and Harvey White, Lia Lund and Scott Kivel, and Brett Dickinson, 2018.12 Judith Linhares in her studio, 2021, Vinyl, 141 x 304 in. Photo: Amanda Marie Mason Judith Linhares, Mother, 2009, Oil on linen, 22 x 26 in. Collection of Arlene Schechet Judith Linhares, American Paisley, 2013, Oil on linen, 9 x 12 in. Courtesy of the artist Judith Linhares, Woodpecker, 1985, Oil on linen, 48 x 36 in. Collection of Brooks Adams Judith Linhares, Dance II, 2017, Oil on linen, 33 x 25 in. Courtesy of the artist and PPOW, New York Judith Linhares, Various studio items, Dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist Judith Linhares, High Desert, 2018, Oil on linen, 60 x 72 in. Collection of Jonathan A. Olsoff and Sophie de Bellissen Judith Linhares, Stir, 2004, Oil on linen, 54 x 78 in. McEvoy Family Collection Judith Linhares, Picnic Rock, 2008, Oil on linen, 60 x 90 in. Private Collection

Mary Jo Vath Mary Jo Vath, Red Reflection, 2018, Oil on canvas, 15 ¾ x 15 ¾ in. Collection of Stephen A. Forte Mary Jo Vath, Monkey Hat, 2015, Oil on canvas, 15 ¼ x 15 ¼ in. Courtesy of the artist Mary Jo Vath, Silver Shoes, 2021,Oil on canvas, 12 x 12 in. Courtesy of the artist Mary Jo Vath, Portrait, 2019,Oil on canvas, 15 ¾ x 15 ¾ in. Collection of Mark and Amanda Marie Mason Mary Jo Vath, Sandwich, 2011, Oil on linen, 12 x 12 in. Courtesy of the artist Mary Jo Vath, Spirit Animal, 2015, Oil on canvas, 12 x 12 in. Collection of Ellen Berkovitch

Ellen Berkenblit Ellen Berkenblit, Sunshine, 2018, Oil, paintstick, and charcoal on canvas, 84 x 200 in. Courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York Ellen Berkenblit, The Missing Peacock Feather, 2019, Oil on linen, 93 x 76 in. Skarstedt Ellen Berkenblit, Tiger Fur Umbrella, 2019, Oil, paintstick, and charcoal on calico, 53 x 55 ¼ in. Courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York Ellen Berkenblit, Untitled, 2018, Gouache and graphite on paper, 11 x 15 in. Courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York Ellen Berkenblit, Leopold, 2021, Oil on linen, 14 x 11 in. Courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York

Bill Adams Bill Adams, Big Shot, 2018, Oil, acrylic, and plaster gauze on canvas, 72 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist Bill Adams, Family, 2021, Porcelain, 13 x 9 x 7 in. Courtesy of the artist Bill Adams, #25, 2020, Terracotta, 8 x 7 x 5 in. Courtesy of the artist Bill Adams, Mother Duck #3, 2021, Terracotta, 9 x 7 x 7 in. Courtesy of the artist Bill Adams, Winkey, 2021, Terracotta, 6 x 5 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist Bill Adams, Duck Boat #1, 2020, Terracotta, 9 x 4 x 5 in. Courtesy of the artist Bill Adams, Benny In the Afternoon (2), 2021, Ballpoint and watercolor on paper, 22 ½ x 16 ½ in. Courtesy of the artist Bill Adams, Benny In The Afternoon, 2021, Ballpoint on paper, 22 ½ x 16 ½ in. Courtesy of the artist Bill Adams, At Sea, 2021, Ballpoint, charcoal, pencil, gesso, and watercolor on paper, 28 x 19 ½ in. Courtesy of the artist Bill Adams, Longhair, 2021, Ballpoint on paper, 20 x 14 in. Courtesy of the artist

Dona Nelson Dona Nelson, Apollo’s Cockroach, 2017, Acrylic and acrylic mediums on canvas (two-sided), 93 x 85 in.; Stand will be approximately 90 x 47 x 10 in. Private Collection, Courtesy of Thomas Erben Gallery, New York Dona Nelson, Studio Portrait Over Time, 2016, Cheesecloth, muslin, painted string and acrylic mediums on linen Base: 38 x 32 in. (Panels: 81 x 35 ½ in. each), Private Collection, Courtesy of Thomas Erben Gallery, New York

Karin Davie Karin Davie, Beam Me Up no 1 (small), 2020, Oil on canvas over wood, 24 x 30 x 7/8 in. (each panel 12 x 30 x 7/8 in.), Courtesy of the artist Karin Davie, While My Painting Gently Weeps no 1, 2019, Oil on canvas over shaped stretcher, 61 ½ x 56 x 1 ½ in., Courtesy of the artist Karin Davie, In The Metabolic no 7, 2020, Oil on linen over shaped stretcher, 63 x 60 x 1 ½ in. Courtesy of the artist

Studio Images Bill Adams Studio, Photo: Courtesy of the artist 2021 Ellen Berkenblit Studio, Photo: Steven P. Harris 2021 Dona Nelson Studio, Photo: Gary Donnelly 2021 Karin Davie Studio, Photo: Zocalo Studios/Spike Mafford 2021 Mary Jo Vath Studio, Photo: Amanda Marie Mason 2021

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