[music] Welcome to the Modern Art Notes Podcast, I'm Tyler Green. This week, a major retrospective of a major pop artist. My guest is Kathleen Chafee, the curator of Marisol, a retrospective which is at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, that's the one formerly known as the Albright Knox, through January 6, 2025. The exhibition presents work Marisol made between the 1950s and the early 2000s. It builds on an extraordinary collection of works that Marisol left to the Buffalo AKG Museum upon her death. The museum and Delmonico books have published an outstanding catalog, one of the best of this year or last when it was technically published. Amazon and Bookshop offer it for $40 to $70 you will want to own this one. In the second segment, Elizabeth Kersch on Virginia Haramillo's Handmade Papers. If you enjoy the show, please give us a five-star rating and a review wherever you downloaded and tell a friend. Thanks very much. Kathleen Chafee, after the break. The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas presents Janet Sobel all over through August 11, 2024. Janet Sobel burst onto the New York art scene in the mid-1940s with a novel approach to modern abstraction, dripping and pouring skeins of paint onto horizontal boards or canvases and filling these supports from corner to corner. She was an innovator of all over painting. The Menil's exhibition focuses on Sobel's abstract practice, bringing together some 30 artworks from museums, private collections, and the artists' family. Find details at menil.org. The Menil Collection is always free. Located in the heart of downtown Berkeley at the edge of the University of California campus, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is one of the nation's leading university art museums, locally rooted, globally relevant institution that connects audiences with the most exciting artists and filmmakers of our time. Uniquely dedicated to both art and film, BAMFA hosts more than a dozen art exhibitions, hundreds of film screenings, and countless public programs each year, with a growing emphasis on contemporary work by Black, Asian, and Latinx voices. To see what's on view and plan a visit, go to BAMFA.org. The National Sculpture Center is proud to present Sarah Z, an exhibition that invites viewers into a captivating collection of new site-specific works spanning three gallery spaces. With installations that will integrate painting, sculpture, images, sound, and video with the surrounding architecture, Sarah Z will create intimate systems that reference the rapidly changing world. The exhibition will blur the boundaries between making and showing, process and product, digital and material, ultimately to question how objects acquire their meaning. Sarah Z is on view at the Nasher from February 3rd through August 18th. Plan your visit at nashersculpturescenter.org. And we're back. Kathleen Chaffee, welcome to the Modern Art Notes Podcast. Thank you so much. I don't usually start conversations with creators and historians with nuts and bolts questions, but I think it's mighty appropriate here. Because Buffalo is one of the relatively few U.S. art museums that holds archival collections in a manner consistent with, say, a university special collections library, not exactly the same, but, you know, you're doing, you're able to do that more than many museums. How did your willingness to take on an extraordinary gift from the Marisol Estate enable this project? So Marisol died in 2016, and it wasn't until she passed away that we had kind of final outreach and confirmation from her executors, that it was her decision that upon her death she wanted to leave the entirety of her estate to our museum. So we now know, I mean, we didn't know at the time, it's about 600 works on paper, about 100 sculptures, of which around 50 are human-sized. And her library, her papers, her photography, which is her photography collection, which is about 6,000 photographs, and her apartment in Tribeca. We actually don't, you know, as an institution, we have a wonderful archivist, but our archive is mainly an institutional archive. So accepting the archive of an artist was a big conversation and bringing that into the museum. The thing we learned very quickly was how interconnected these papers are with the gift of art. Most of these works, I think it's safe to say most of these works had not been exhibited when you include the works on paper. For many, we had no dates, we had no titles, and it was only if a work had been published. Did we have, I mean, even then you have to revisit it, did we have kind of a strong sense of title and date? We had a lot of research to do in identifying the works and in getting them into the proper kind of historical order and context, and we could never have done that without her papers, where there were photographs from her shows at Castelli or at Stable Gallery, Sydney Janis Gallery, her own notes, you know, different checklists, et cetera. The institution's willingness to accept the gift is something that I still stand a little bit in awe of. I don't think it hurt that there was an apartment to sell, which we did sell, and those funds went into the museum's endowment, and I think that was very strategic on her part to make sure that there was a little bit that could help offset the additional staff we had to take on to accept this book west. You write in the catalog that having access to all of the material you just described revealed that, quote, "a significant portion of her, Marisol's creative achievement, remains unknown to the general public or even to specialists." What did we not know that this project now reveals? If Marisol's name is known at all in the art world, and I think she is known by, of course, scholars of pop art or mid-century, or people who came up in New York in the 70s, 80s, and 90s who were able to see regular exhibitions of her work, that if she's known outside of those circles, it's for the works that she made in the 1960s, which are these amazingly satirical, also critical, and political human-sized sculptures that put on full display many of the stereotypes of the 1960s as it relates to women, women's roles in society, also devastating critiques of political figures and political machinations of the time. These have been on display in American museums since her breakthrough solo shows at the Stable Gallery in 1962 and 1964 that had kind of lines around the block, 2004,000 people. Numerous American museums acquired works either then or happily by gift later, and those have often been on view here and there. There have often been decades, though, where they weren't. The rest of her career, so everything else besides that decade, her experimental work that she made after moving to New York in 1950 where she's a little bit under the sway of her different professors in classes with Hans Hoffman and Provincetown in New York at the Brooklyn Museum School at the Art Students' League, and where she's also hanging out with the circle of artists at the Cedar Tavern and absorbing some of the ethos and crises of the abstract expressionists who were a little bit older than her, but with whom she hung out a lot in the '50s. And then, of course, everything she made after the '60s, her profoundly strange and oddly very contemporary feeling today works related to the life of the oceans and the interdependence of human and animal life from the 1970s, as well as works about American society and its violence, interpersonal violence, government violence, political violence, and what it does to bodies that she was also making in the '70s, as well as her just phenomenal portrait sculpture dealing with society and its ills, as well as people she admired in the decades that followed. So speaking of the 1950s, I thought we'd kind of begin to dip into the UVA and Marisol's making of work pretty close to the beginning. You write that she was interested early on in pre-Columbian sculpture. How did she discover it? Why did it interest her? Marisol's born to Venezuelan parents, but she's born in Paris. Her parents were wealthy and more than relatively privileged. She had quite a privileged upbringing, kind of able to travel around as a youth, and then she stayed put in Caracas from the age of five until she was around 11. And then spent time in Los Angeles and in other cities. By the time she kind of is able to dedicate herself full-time to art, it's basically almost immediately after finishing high school. She always thinks she's going to go to art school, go to college, but it never happens. And so the museums of New York City, the galleries of New York City, and the libraries of New York City, she ended up saying this was her university. She read books on art history and aesthetics, and she saw all the art she could take in, I think spending a lot of time at the Metropolitan Museum. She saw a couple of shows, I think there were a number of galleries in New York who were just starting to show Ancient American art, pre-Columbian sculpture. And her father in the 1950s, in the second half of the 1950s, was living in Mexico and she visited him there and also would have seen pre-Columbian sculpture in Mexico. What's interesting, of course, is that she's picking up these styles, things like Ancient American art. So she took classes with William King, who was working in an American folk art tradition, and she had a significant library of books on American folk art. She's absorbing these works and picking up their styles and experimenting with them, and they're making their way into her work. What we see even then in the 1950s is when she starts exhibiting these works, both of those aspects of her practice, the kind of influence of pre-Columbian art and the influence of folk art, are treated as if they are her inheritance or cultural inheritance as a Venezuelan artist, as a Latin American immigrant, rather than as sophisticated adoptions by an artist who's in the foment of cultural activity in New York and picking up styles and putting them down. Well, speaking of which, there is a great story, I believe it's in your essay in the catalog, as I mentioned in the intro to this episode, the catalog is an astonishing thing, a best of the best model publication that anybody interested in 20th century art should own, links on manpodcast.com. There is a story in your catalog essay about a John Perot review of Marisol's work that involves this question of folk art, and you include also Marisol's response to it, so please tell me that story. This is one of those finds in the archives. I still don't know whether she ever sent the letter, I was never able to find whether it was published, but John Perot, who they had been friendly previously, published a review of her 1973 show at Sydney Janus, in which she debuted these remarkably strange sculptures of fish with her own face attached to them among many drawings and other works. And he kind of accused her of having lost her way, and he described her neo-sophisticated appropriation of folk art styles or techniques. And she drafted a letter basically saying, "If you call my work folk art," I think very much intuiting that this is not a critique of her sophisticated use of folk art, but sort of painting her with a broad brush as using folk art somehow because it was tied to her identity as a Latin American, she said, "If you call my work folk art, it's because you're prejudiced against my South American background, folk you." I literally guffawed what I read when I first read the folk you, you can imagine how many different times our team working on merchandising tried to come up with something that would work for sale in the shop using that as a catchphrase. They might still get to it. One of the surprises to me, maybe it shouldn't have been, about kind of the range and number of things she was checking out and trying on and trying to work into her work in the 1950s, one of the surprises to me was her interest in Rodin's Gates of Hell. I had just never thought of that. I guess first, how was Rodin's Gates of Hell important to her and why? And then kind of, are there some examples within the universe that you can point to? I think most people wouldn't have associated Marisol either with pre-Columbian sculpture or with Rodin, mostly because her 50s sculptures are in very few public collections. And the majority of the ones out in the world, I think she has now left us in Buffalo as part of her estate. I don't know how she got to know Rodin, but she did cite the Gates of Hell as a source. And the figures in these bronzes that she was making in the '50s and that she first showed in Mass, a little bit of Mass at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1957, have these kind of tumbling figures. They almost look like acrobats in a Jwan Moreau painting, but then they're read through Rodin's bronzes. And I think the reason that the connection to the Gates of Hell, which she put out there in the world, also resonates is because they have this kind of erotic sensibility. The figures are sometimes nearly copulating, or you have these oversized fallacies on some of the figures. But then they're also almost playful and funny, they're childlike. She masses them together to create sculptural form. Sometimes they're inside of printer's boxes that she found on the streets of New York. And then those are cast in clay, these sort of figures inside of them. And other times they're in bronze. One of my favorites of this is a work in our collection called My Wedding Cake. And it's a group of figures that kind of almost, they almost are shaped like a flame and they rise to a point kind of tumbling and massing and along the base of the sculpture she's inscribed its title. And this is a work already in the late '50s, so she's only in her late '20s, but is already referencing the fact that everyone she met and every journalist she talked to seemed fully free to ask her, "When are you going to get married? When are you going to get settled down and have kids?" I've always thought that this kind of cake is her answer, this baked in bronze wedding cake. 11imageonmanpodcast.com. After having some commercial and critical successes in New York in the mid to late '50s, Marisol gets up and leaves for Rome. What does she get out of being in Rome? It's a good question, I think she got out, what she got out of that sojourn away was a path forward. She had this kind of, I mean, it's hard to put yourself back in the moment because it's the first year Leo Castelli is just open. She's in one of his first group shows also with Robert Rauschenberg. And Castelli just says, "Well, you should have a solo, have a solo," in the first year of operations. And Alex Katz, you know, really recently in the Times was asked her in the New York Times magazine, was recently asked about exhibitions that changed the way he thought about art. And he cited two, and one of them was this 1957 solo show of Marisol that included all of these bronzes and terracottas and her early kind of wood sculptures in a folk vein. None of these look anything like what she'll become known for in the '60s. So he said that there was a critic or a poet at the time, John Denvy, who saw the show and said, "Castelli should just close, you know, he'll never top this exhibition." And of course Jasper Johns' famous solo at Castelli was yet to come. She had a bunch of attention and the attention, I mean, there's an article that described this, "Latin Beauty's host of stern people staring pets," you know, she had these sculptures of cats and these immigrant figures that looked like they were taken from an Ellis Island photograph. She got attention and she saw herself replicated in the media, and not for the last time she was overwhelmed by a feeling of displacement in seeing all of these doubles that she didn't really recognize being repeated in the press. So she left New York, she first went to Paris and she knew Paris, of course, having lived there when she was younger and she thought she would stay, she stayed very briefly and then went to Rome. She described being in the hotel room, though, in Paris, kind of on the way to Rome, feeling completely lost, feeling like she was, quote, "You know, going to lose her body and her mind." And as a way to stop that feeling, she began to trace herself. And it was this process of tracing herself, often her hands and feet and then her head that really got-- I mean, physically trace herself like on paper. To trace herself on paper and then fill these drawings in. They're these rainbow color, it's saturated color pencil drawings and she would use this kind of approach to color pencil for her whole career, kind of randomly drop a box of colored pencils and pick up whatever color her hand touched first and just start using it. These drawings kind of brought her back to herself and brought her back to drawing. They gave her a way to keep working when she wasn't sure how to go forward. In Rome, she kept working in bronze, but she also got a little bit of quiet. She had been extremely social in New York for the better part of a decade. And going to Rome just allowed her to also hide out. When she came back to New York more than a year later, she was still working in a similar vein, but very, very soon after she went to a party at Alfonso O'Sario's house. And his wife, who was an artist also and a poet, also made hats as a hobby. And she had all of these old turned wood, kind of folk art, one could call them folk art, these beautiful turned wood heads that a milliner would use. And she gave Marisol a bag of them. And Marisol almost immediately started turning them into heads in her sculptures. And this was kind of the breakthrough that led to all of the work that she started making in the 1960s. So I think what Rome did was set her up to be receptive to change. And when she got back to New York, she immediately started pursuing it. So is it then, I guess it's too much to say that Marisol returned to the US with a mature style? Yes. But when she returned to the US, she was prepared to arrive at a mature style. And I would argue that when she returned to the US, she was prepared to arrive at what would become her mature style. But it took, I mean, New York was always her home since she was 20 something. It took coming back to New York to kind of kick it into the next degree. This is a time it's been joked when the streets of New York were never so clean because Robert Rauschenberg is going around picking up everything for his combines. And Marisol is the same. He's sourcing all of the wood for her sculptures of the early 60s, especially just from things she can find from building sites around the city. She's finding things in antique stores, weird taxidermy mounts. And she's putting her own fashionable or unfashionable shoes and handbags and hats. Not hats, but putting her own fashionable or unfashionable handbags and shoes into her sculptures. So New York is kind of constantly making its way felt. This is the moment, more or less, which she begins to be associated with pop art. So maybe before we talk about that, do you think of her as being a pop artist? Do I think of her as being a pop artist? I absolutely do. Yes. I do. Okay. Yes. Very much so. I think of her as actually being at the center of what we might consider an expanded definition of pop art, which is the definition that I hope we're all, all of us can get on the same page that I hope we're all kind of living with now because the earliest definitions of pop art, even those written by Lucy LePard, who's a brilliant art historian, you go back though and read them and they are extremely limited. And they're very New York-centric and focused on a type of pop art that is cool, that is usually made by white men and doesn't take up politics in an overt way. We now know that even that reading doesn't fit many of the artists that were put into that category. I mean, name an artist who hasn't chafed at the movement, which they were associated. But with great work of many exhibition makers, curators, art historians over the past 25 years, things like the Walker's, Darcy Alexander's exhibition, International Pop, Donna de Salvo, had a wonderful pop exhibition looking at early, hand-painted pop. These shows have really expanded what we think of and I believe now we're looking at a much more international movement and one that has a lot more room for subject matter that's very different than those early definitions. So what does Marisol's pop subject matter? To answer that question I would say, it's worth pausing for a minute to think about the more obvious elements of pop subject matter that we know. So, you know, magazine clippings in the hands of Roy Lichtenstein, elements of commercial culture in the hands of Eddie Warhol, Rosenquist picking up advertisements and incorporating them into his works along with commercial, like literal commercial objects, often these artists are using slightly outdated materials that's, you know, deliberate if you think of what Lichtenstein the hairdos are not, the 1960s, invariably it's often a very fifties feeling making its way in. Marisol's subject matter is often drawn from the same explosive expansion of photo magazines that these artists are being inspired by and drawing from, so life, look, time, so advertisements as well as photo essays on American culture on, you know, like everyone's going to the beach and then there'll be a spread of everybody on the beach and the fashions of the beach. But it's also looking at women and women and advertisements, women in photo essays, how women are living their lives in the city. And then the other aspect which is very little, in fact, until now almost unknown in relationship to her practice, but I definitely read it as an element of pop culture is her use of American vernacular photography. So she shared a studio in the 50s with this photographer who you could, you know, let's say you have a portrait of your great grandparents, your grandparents, you have one print, it's in a frame, you want to make a copy to give it to somebody in the family. You don't know where the negative is. It could be a studio photograph and no negative exists, at least not in your hands. So you could send it in by mail to the sky in New York and he would make prints in charge, I don't know, $1 or $5. Marisol shared his studio and I don't know if she was only there at night. I do know she usually worked at night or worked through the night. She would go through his trash and she created a big collection that we now have in the archive of photographs along certain themes. So she collected photographs of weddings. Of course, these are also the things people would send in, right? The things that you inherit. Photographs of weddings, photographs of babies and family photographs. And she made sculptures in the early 1960s based on each of these themes. And when you go through the stack that she accumulated in the archives and you can find the exact source for a number of her sculptures from the 60s, from this stack, you go through it and you realize, of course, everybody in a wedding photograph is the same, but she collected wedding photographs of all races and ages and classes, really, that people would mail in. Every wedding photograph though is pretty darn similar, as is every family photo, as is every photo of a baby. Once you start distancing. So it's this distillation of American vernacular kind of family photography that she's, to her, it may be as exotic, but that is a pop subject matter, I would argue. Yes. No, I buy that. I got, you know, not that it matters what I think, you know, air quotes, counts as pop or not. But I, you know, for me, when I think of pop, and again, I may well be wrong, I always think of like really flat. I mean, I think of mega, mega, mega flat, Marisol's sculptures are anything but mega flat. They are maximally, often playfully, often humorously, dimensional. Is that something that I and we think of in the 2020s, or was that the kind of rupture from flat pop that she would have thought through in the 1960s? I think when she starts making these works in 1961, and I could be off by a few months, but I don't think there is pop per se just yet, what she's in the realm of is what was then being called neo data, where you have Rauschenberg and Johns, and neo data really meaning neo Duchamp, because that was the data is that people could see in New York. And she also was influenced by Duchamp, interestingly, specifically his drawing with my tongue and my cheek, which is a cast of his cheek that is adhered to a piece of paper. Obviously, Johns experts can fight over the influence of Duchamp in that direct way on Jasper Johns as well. So she's entering at a moment when I think it doesn't quite yet have a name, but very soon it does by 62, 63. One of the most interesting things about the catalog for me is the way that you and pretty much all of the authors emphasize, or maybe less emphasize, Marisol's stylistic innovations and foreground her interest in certain subjects, certain narratives, certain critiques of contemporary sometimes global society, sometimes contemporary American society, sometimes contemporary global society. And I thought a good way of getting at that while also pointing to the range of Marisol's interests might be for me to raise some of those subject matters you pointed out in your catalog essay and to ask you to name a worker to that you think is a good example of those kinds of things. And the first one I wanted to raise was it was Vietnam and how the Vietnam War made its way into her work. Well, thank you for before I dive in, thank you for noticing that I you know, we have to leave something for future art historians to do. I actually think there's quite a lot of formal, a formal writing on Marisol still to come. There's there's a lot of work yet to do. And let me just jump in to say that I you note in your catalog essay that the reason you took the approach you did is because you were writing for now that you wanted to point to why Marisol was important now. And in today's art world and in today's studios, artists are highly interested in subject matter. And then Marisol seems like a valuable precedent for that. Sorry, I'll get back out of the way. No, no, no. She made quite a few works that obliquely reference and embody her enormous distaste with the level of violence. She was seeing in America in the late 1960s, including the suppress the violence of the government and police suppression of protests against the war in Vietnam. She was staunchly anti war her entire life and often frustrated with her adopted country's tendency towards war throughout our history. The war in Vietnam made its way though very specifically into one sculpture that's worth pointing out, which is called three women with umbrella. And it shows three ostensibly Caucasian women, two of whom have their eyes, let's not say blacked out, but they're not sculpted by the artist and one of whom has painted eyes. And they're shielding themselves with kind of parasols and sun hats. And one of one of the figures has her arm extended so that a taxidermy bird kind of a blue jay bird can perch on it, which is very reminiscent of the Disney heroines of the time kind of sleeping beauty, taming the wild animals of the forest. On the center of the torso of one of the women, Marisol has executed a virtuosic but heartbreaking drawing which she drew directly from an article in in Life magazine on a massacre in Vietnam. A photograph in that article in fact. A photograph, yes. So that she's drawing from a from a from a photo essay about this massacre. And in the original drawing, which Sid Sacks found and referenced a few years back in the wonderful catalogues, seductive subversion. In the photograph, there's a mother and another woman crying out and you don't see what they're crying out over in the in the in the frame, but crying out over a scene of murder and destruction. And one of the women is holding a toddler and the other one is holding a baby. And so Marisol has has removed the women and drawn the toddler and the baby as if they are as if they are the the children perhaps of the central woman. And it's very much kind of bringing the war home. You have this juxtaposition of serene ambivalence and this just highly disturbing drawing, even if you don't know that the source matter, which was never referenced at the time. And in her working notes, Marisol called this work simply Vietnam. And she eventually titled it through women with umbrella. This was installed in the same 1966 exhibition at Sydney Janis gallery that included the party, which is her tour de force of the 60s. It's a 15 figure, very kind of unfun, but extremely fun to look at uptown party. And this work was installed alongside that and sculptures of sunbathers. It's hard for me to get away from how much I think this one sculpture casts those other society types and people involved in leisure in a different light. We'll have images of all of that on manpodcast.com. Next subject you identified, how about feminist anger? Well, not my most graceful introduction, but there it goes. Yeah, anything from the 1970s, you can pick up and think about feminist anger in Marisol's works. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these works did not sell well in the 1970s. She's also, you know, there's quite a lot of work being made at this time that is about women, women's bodies, violence against women. But Marisol had been a Doyan of the art world. She had been the center, she had been really at the center of power in the New York art world. And she wasn't someone just coming up or teaching out in California. She's somebody who has all of this power in authority and is making these angry and very, very tough works. I think about her casts of faces that have been injured by some object. It could be a coke bottle, it could be a beer can. She has a marvelous sculpture that we couldn't get for conservation works for the show, perhaps one that's maybe her best known work called Love from 1962, which is in the Museum of Modern Arts collection. And it just shows the bottom half of a face, a mouth and a nose with a coke bottle inserted into it as if it's either being choked or if the mouth is filating the coke bottle. So if in '62, there is this kind of erotic relationship to consumerism and implied violence of that sculpture too. By the mid 1970s, you have these clay faces that are literally being destroyed by these consumer objects. And implicitly, perhaps these American objects. At a time when narratives about rape are making their way into more prominent news outlets, she talks to, she tells a people journalist about her own choice to have an abortion. She's putting things out there that are perhaps not to be expected by someone with as much power as she had had in the art world in the '60s. In a related story, you also write that she makes works that testify to interpersonal violence and probably not only in sculpture. Yes, I think that's true. Her drawings of the '70s go back to that moment I mentioned in the late 1950s when she's tracing her body. There's a great number of body tracings in the '70s, some very, very large and some small. In a group of monumental drawings, there's one called "Lick the Tire of My Bicycle." There's another called "I Did My Future." She's tracing, in this case, dancers' bodies across the paper in colored pencil. But you have all of these arms and hands intruding into the frame and the hands are merging with guns. And the guns are penetrating the women's bodies, sometimes her mouth, sometimes her anus, sometimes her vagina. Maybe you can't quite tell where. They're showing bodies that have become violent implements and bodies that are affected by that becoming. We talked a little bit earlier about the way or ways in which Marisol was an immigrant. She was born in France to Venezuelan parents and managed to get around the globe a good bit. What types of works did she make that engaged with the immigrant experience? Perhaps some that even might be particularly relevant to us now? Yes. I mean, it's very fair to say she wasn't your typical immigrant because she's born to wealthy parents in Paris and has the ability to travel a little bit freely until she's able to support herself through her art later in the '60s. Until then, at a time when Rauschenberg lived in a cold water flat and shaved his hair as short as possible so that he could just sneak a shower when he went to other parties at people's houses, she was able to just make art and not have to worry about how to make the rent as much. But she was interested in a sense of displacement. This had been her experience since childhood. Her mother took her own life when she was 11 and Marisol didn't speak for several years. After that time, she was shuttled around as her, I think, father tried to find a place that could handle her. She was kicked out of school for her attitude, the usual artist behavior in some way, annoying the nuns with her silences. And very early on in the '50s, she made her first sculpture of an immigrant family but not her last, which was called the Hungarians. And it depicts a mother and a father, a toddler, and a baby on a wheeled cart. And they look like they've just stepped out of a photograph, an identification photograph. They look a little lost and very flat. And this cart implies the kind of immigrant experience and their almost surely refugee experience as Hungarians in New York at that time, in between mass exituses from Nazi persecution and then Soviet persecution. She made works that related to her experience as an immigrant very obviously when it comes to a work like the Generals, which is, in my opinion, one of her greatest works of the '60s, which shows George Washington and Simone Bolivar, so the revolutionary heroes of her native, Venezuela or Latin America, but he was a real hero in Venezuela, Bolivar, and Washington, her adopted home on a two-person horseback ride. And this is in the really middle of the Cold War when Latin America is being used as a bulwark against communist influence in the US. We're trying to keep our friends close in Latin America at this time. And these two men are extremely close on the back of this horse. And there's a soundtrack that comes out of the horses butt by David Amram, which is this very perotic military march, and the work is definitely poking fun at her adopted home, but also referencing her own background. It's also a perfect work around which to talk about her address of art history. It is a work that takes dead aim at the Equestrian tradition going back to ancient Rome. The US used to have that Equestrian tradition in the early American Republic, particularly with Washington sitting on a horse. The use of Washington within the American tradition by lost cause sculptors. I mean, it's all there, both the use of Washington, the use of the Equestrian form. I mean, it's all larded in there. My other little favorite Marisol art historical wink is in the party, which you mentioned a few moments ago, the work in Toledo. The central figure is wearing a skirt torn from a Matisse cutout. So it is a painted cutout. So that's so funny. Yeah, that's right. And then the figures themselves are Egyptian, basically. You know, it's taken great from the Metropolitan. Yeah. I suspect that as you went through working on this show, you had a bunch of experiences of just kind of chuckling at Marisol's art historical cleverness. Yeah, often. One of the most profound things that's so easy to overlook isn't such a kind of a punny reference, but it's the way that she does embody, speaking of Duchamp again, this belief that the work of art is very much completed by the viewer. She leaves so much unfinished in her sculptures, and you almost don't notice it because you're so busy finishing them. There isn't a complete pattern, for example, on any garment, on any woman or man, almost anywhere in her work, she starts the pattern and then she just sort of trails off and doesn't finish it. Many of the skirts are half drawn with a couple of flowers, and then you get to complete the rest with your mind. And more profoundly, of course, you have these sculpted heads, and then incredibly blocky torsos, where you get to fill in the body parts you can't see. She sometimes gives you the sorts of erogenous zones that X-ray specs might have promised to let you be able to catch a glimpse of, sort of breasts put on top of a boxy body, buttocks put on the back. They're really sensual. They're also very, very funny, but all the while the viewer is being very much implicated in completing the work. And that engagement is, I think, central to the way these sculptures succeeded. You can't just look at them. You're always making them. A great example is Ruth from 1962, in which three women, I think three women, are apparently wearing a barrel from which body parts somehow magically protrude. I think it's six or seven heads. Oh, is it more? Yes. No, it depends on the photograph. If you see one, you might think, this is the case right here, dear listeners, if you, for seeing works of art in person. So if you've only ever seen Ruth in reproduction, it can look like there are three heads, but the sculpture is completely in the round. It's a portrait of Ruth Kligman, who was a friend, a good friend of Marisol's and kind of a bombshell painter in New York in the '50s and onward. But she's addressing, yes, it's as if she's trying to address all comers at a party. And she's, she's just, every face is presented to a different crowd. Their cast hands, cast fingers and hands, making beckoning gestures that are cast for Marisol's hands. And then these hilarious pairs of breasts that are cast from fruit and vegetables that Marisol has appended to the outside of the barrel. And then Ruth has multiple pairs of these tiny little folk art legs coming out from the bottom. It's a really funny work. It was either the second or third, I think Marisol to enter an institutional collection. It's at the Rose. Of course, the first was the Albright. Two more of these matchy match questions. I was not prepared for the works that deal with the ocean and environmental precarity. I had never heard of nor seen one. What are they? We were talking earlier about Marisol's departure from New York to Rome in the late 1950s to kind of get away from the center of the art world. I'm sure Rome had a contemporary art scene at the time, but she was escaping New York after she has her amazingly popular exhibitions in '62, '64 and '66 in New York. She represents Venezuela, the Venice Biennial in '68, and then drops out of the art world for now a kind of a more sustained period. She is really troubled by the violence in American society. She's troubled by the suppression of protests against the war in Vietnam. She's troubled in general with being in the center of the art world also. She was at the height of her celebrity at this time, considered to be the most reproduced kind of woman in art magazines, but also fashion magazines, women's magazines. She leaves and she starts scuba diving. She takes up scuba diving and really seriously, not in Adilla Tanteshwe, but she estimated that she spent months of her life underwater in these early years of the '70s to great depths. She saw people die because of scuba diving accidents, people who were permanently injured on these accidents, and she took probably more risks than she should have. Diving, she loved the silence of being underwater, and she came back from those early years of diving with a new body of sculpture where she was trying to capture some of what she had experienced in the interaction with animals. Interestingly, she didn't choose just any fish to sculpt. All of the fish that she portrayed during this period were also fish that the US military had named submarines after. She described some of these fish sculptures, which are highly varnished, really polished, super different from the blocky semi-unfinished works that she had been making in the 1960s. She makes these strange, extremely surreal fish, and she gives them her own face, often her face, trying to look like a fish. We think about the level of empathy and mimicry that we have with our pets and with even animals in nature. Try to get to know it in the dumbest possible way by ever so slightly becoming like it. She depicts these really imperfect empathetic portraits of fish at a time when she was also becoming increasingly saddened by the die-offs and the coral reefs that she was beginning to witness, and this is what made her eventually stop diving. It was the danger of diving and also the damage she was beginning to see in the reefs due to pollution and due to changing climate, even then. There's one titled Barracuda, which is an elongated, I don't know, three and a half meter long sculpture where you have this entire fish body, and then as you walk around with the front of it, there's the face about which you were speaking. It also looks like a torpedo. It's the Barracuda, but also a weapon. There's also the Fishman, which is for my money should have been on the cover of the catalog. This incredibly strange creature from the black lagoon with flipper feet and kuros pose taken straight from ancient sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum, but with a cast fish for a head. He's a strange hero or anti-hero for the moment that she was living, this amalgamation of human and animal taken from sci-fi, of course, but also her own experiences. Last one of these, in what sorts of works did Marisol destabilize norms of gender and sexuality? This is an aspect of her work that I hadn't really found noted before starting research on the exhibition and the catalog, and it took many years of looking at her practice for me to start kind of feeling this out, and it's still something that I think needs more research and thought. She clearly had a disdain for binaries across the board in her work. You will constantly see kind of phenotypically female forms adorned with phalae at their ankles or at their heads or anywhere across their body. In one sculpture in particular called the Bicycle Race, you have a kind of phenotypically female gendered body and phenotypically male, but the ostensibly female form has testicles hanging underneath the bicycle seat, and the bicycle seat operates as a phallus in the sculpture, and that's early, and then going into her later drawings, this sort of continues. There's a real illusion and slipping and overlay of bodies that, through the massing of bodies, especially in her drawings in the 60s and 70s, seems almost determined to destabilize binary and to destabilize the ability to categorize forms as we come upon them, and then we spoke a little bit about the breasts on a sculpture like Ruth, these cast elements of fruit. There is in the kind of repeated litany of these erogenous zones, these eroticized forms, and the way that she's parodying them in her sculptures, be they male or female, the show, I wasn't able to get a few of the loans that have kind of parodic phalluses on them from the 60s, but they exist as well alongside the breasts. The more I looked at them, the more I started to see them being used in her hands, almost like jewelry, there are these things applied to the body after sculpting, and the kind of inherent nature of these as indicators for gender starts to feel somewhat arbitrary. It starts to feel not like something completely quote unquote natural, and I think that's really, it's subtle, but it's also fascinating as you look at it and in volume throughout the work. Finally, it's extraordinarily rare for a curator at an art museum to have an opportunity to redefine what we know about an artist and their oeuvre as you've done here. I think that's especially, I think it's especially rare to get to do that absent any commercial pressure, the estate's yours. So leaving Marisol aside, because we've been talking about Marisol, what did you learn from having the opportunity to do such a thing? Oh, thank you for the compliment. I think every curator hopes to redefine the artists of when we put a show together, so that I'll leave up to audiences. I mean, what did I learn? This has been the project that I will think about for the rest of my career. You never, I mean, at least in my experience, you almost never get a phone call that changes an institution as profoundly as this one has, but also as a curator to sort of be the first non-family or friend to walk into her apartment after she passed away, and then be handed the keys at the end of it and get to work with our director and amazing board who are willing to take this leap to take on this estate. I think there are a few museums that might have accepted it. It's required a lot of resources on the museum's behalf, but for me, I thought I knew a little bit about Marisol. She's an artist I've admired my whole career as an art historian and have spent time thinking about and have loved, but getting to study the entirety of her practice, getting to kind of dive in. What you learn is that a great artist gives you very few easy answers. I mean, you know this, that great artists, like I said, make you do the work. Here, I think the more I've been thinking about her lately, you know, as the show has opened in Buffalo, and it's been touring, but as it's opening here, I've been thinking so much about not just the work of curators, but the work of museums. And I have learned a lot about how much an artist can take away from museums. There is a reason she chose a museum. It's because she believed in museums. She believed in what they could do. They work her school. Why she chose us. I mean, I consider it something of a miracle, but coming away from the show, it's led me to think a lot about what we as museums can do, what we can accomplish. She will now be part of the history of this museum forever. I hope that we will always have her work on view in some small or large way, that if people come to Buffalo, they will know that, oh, that's, you know, that's the museum where you can see Marisol, because it certainly won't be everywhere else. We have been able to dedicate unbelievable resources because we have the scholarship, the staff who are passionate and dedicated, and who worked through COVID, who worked, you know, daily and diligently masked in small groups to keep photographing and assembling these sculptures, to keep cataloging the works. This is not something that many places could have accomplished. We hold her copy, right? So you could argue that there's some sort of, there's a possibility to monetize the estate at some point. I don't think that's ever going to be strongly in the cards, although I would love to see Marisol posters on dorm room walls alongside Frida Kahlo. It is a fond hope of mine. I love it. Kathleen Chaffey, thank you. Thank you so much. Drawing on a continued study of physics, science fiction, ancient mythologies, and modernist design, Virginia Hera Mia explores how abstraction can offer alternate ways of understanding our world. See the breadth of her work from the mid-1960s to today in her long overdue exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Plan your visit at mcachicago.org. Support comes from Getty, presenting the world premiere production of Memnon, a one-of-a-kind theatrical event under the stars. The play tells the tale of a powerful Ethiopian king who journeys to the city of Troy to engage in battle during the Trojan's darkest hour. This epic story from the ancient Greek legend of the fall of Troy has been overlooked for over a millennium until now. Memnon comes to life with bold, vivid language, and gripping dramatic conflict. Co-produced with the classical theater of Harlem, a theater company that tells stories through the lens of the African diaspora, directed by Carl Cofield, written by Will Power, and choreographed by Tiffany Rae Fisher. Thursdays through Saturdays this September at the Getty Villa Museum in Los Angeles. Book your tickets now at Getty.edu. Welcome back. Next up, Elizabeth Kirsch joins me to discuss her essay Handmade Papers 1980 to 2005 in the catalog for Virginia Haramillo, Principal of Equivalence, a retrospective now at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Kirsch is a former National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellow, has written for over 15 gallery and museum catalogs, and was in charge of the U.S. Information Agency's International Artist Residency Program. Haramillo is on view at the MCA Chicago through January 5, 2025. We'll have a link to the catalog in which Kirsch's essay appears on manpodcast.com. You can buy it from Amazon or Bookshop for around 50 bucks. Elizabeth Kirsch, welcome to the Modern Art Notes Podcast. Thank you, Tyler. It's an honor to be here. Why, in the mid to late 1980s, did Virginia Haramillo transition for making terrifically successful, intense, large abstract paintings to wanting to work in handmade paper? That's what I wanted to figure out because she was showing her work and had been for a number of years at the Douglas Great Gallery. I was director of the gallery. I had installed some extraordinary paintings of hers, including her stained paintings. And all of a sudden, these paper pieces appeared. And we didn't even know that she was doing this. And what she said later was that her curvilinear paintings are quite well-known, and they're quite famous. The menel just a couple of years ago showed them again, and their extraordinary abstract paintings. And they look very minimal, just like with a field of color and these lines, curvilinear lines, that just kind of meander through the piece. Those were actually very labor-intensive for her. Virginia is very controlling with her medium. I mean, at 80, she was still stretching her own canvases because she didn't like the way anybody else did. And we're talking about canvases that are 60 by 40 inches. So she's very, very controlling in that sense of her art. And she said what had happened was that she went from doing these very controlled works where she actually used parchment paper to trace, like making a mural, and drawing the lines on the parchment paper, turning them over on the canvas and sort of pressing and just sanding. And it would take her weeks to make these paintings. And she said then she learned how to make them, and she was getting more than she went on. And as she went on to the stain paintings, it just got looser and looser. And she said what was happening with the stain paintings is that she loved seeing the kind of spaces between the veils of paint. And she said she just wanted to pursue that more. And one day, she just decided to walk three blocks up the street to Geodonee, which was the papermaking mill, the papermaking mill in the United States. And she decided she was going to rent the whole mill and work with Paul Wong, who was the director of Geodonee. And an artist himself, and just see what would happen. She said I wanted to go from total control to whatever. And so she started experimenting with, first, with the small, they were small, like 12 inches by maybe 12 inches or different sizes. And from there, and those were really quite extraordinary. I remember seeing these and just, they were like nothing else I'd ever seen, and I've looked at a lot of art. And then they were getting bigger and more layered. But the early ones were so fragile, they were almost like lace in some areas. And they were like, you know, old treasure maps or something. I don't even know how to describe them, but they were, I got very emotional looking at them. And you have to understand this was still the green burgundy and era in a way where art was supposed to be about art and about nothing else, other than paint and canvas. And here was, here was paper. Then they started getting bigger. And at that point, I said, Okay, I don't get it. I've seen people like handmade paper, but I don't understand these. And so I got to go with her to Geodonee and watch the whole process. And the only thing she said to me was just wear the right shoes because you're going to get wet. And then watching it is like, I really, it's like she was wrestling an alligator in this water bait. I mean, it was, frankly, it was the most primitive, violent making of art that I've ever seen. And she said, she didn't know how to do she said, I didn't know what the rules were. And so I was just breaking all the rules, but I didn't know what they were to begin with. And Paul Wong said, you know, you just go along with Virginia, she's, you know, she's an extraordinary artist. And she's fearless. She has a quality that I think all great artists have, which is a certain fearlessness, this like, but let's just see what's going to happen. And she, from the beginning, she used linen instead of cotton and linen is much harder to turn into pulp. But it has this quality of when the natural pigments are poured into it with water, it's stronger, but it also is more luminescent. And so that was one thing. She also is always, she said what her main concern, she's always said has been the planet, the earth. And so she told Paul, she wanted every single natural pigment relating to the earth that there was. So they came up with 23 natural pigments. So I saw all these extraordinary colors as kind of like being in India, you know, where they just have these pigments all lined up. And then the pulp would be poured into these buckets of water. And they had spent days making the pulp. And then she would throw in the pigments. But the real thing was they had to order special moles, handmade moles by a great artisan named Timothy Moore. And he had to make them by hand because they were so big, they've never made any that big before or since. And apparently, Timothy Moore said, and I'll never make any that big again. It was just too hard. And so you you've got the mold and decal. And you can kind of see from the images in the catalog. Unfortunately, you know, people just didn't videotape things the way you know, you couldn't just pull out your phone and start filming everything that didn't happen. They took I wish it had because the process, you'd never know how these were made unless you saw them being made. It just was crazy. And so she had a system when they got that big, she had assistance and they all had to wear back braces and hold like four to five assistants and turn this giant mold. And all these kind of like, I don't know what they were exactly wires. The mold and decal that would be attached. And then Virginia would alter this, the actual watermark imagery that ended up being made by playing with masking tape and putting it in various places so that she would make a throw. She would first have it like a base. And then from that, she could alter the mold and they would do certain throws with specific colors. And you know, she would do up to 23 different throws. So hold on, what what is she throwing? What is what is the buckets? The buckets of pigment with the pigment mixed in. And so you had a bucket of the pulp with the water and then she would throw in the pigments depending on which one she wanted. And then that would be mixed, obviously. And then she would throw that onto the mold, but she would only throw it on to certain parts of the mold. So that's what you and that she would do a number of those. And that that was called a cooch, C-O-U-C-H-E. And there'd be one cooch and then there'd be up to five, basically. It's hard to explain. And like I said, I didn't understand it until I saw it. So is that how she would compose images or how would she get the compositions? Well, I would ask, you know, because before she always would make sketches, like with the curve of learning or painting, she'd make little sketches that were very precise. She'd be very precise. And she worked it long. Like I said, she even stretched her own canvases. But she just said, she had no idea how to make handmade papers. She just said, I'm just going to let go. And Paul Wong said, who'd work with all the greats, making papers, you know. Like, you know, we were just experimenting with this process to see where it would take us. So she would put us, she'd throw it on to the mold. And then she, her assistants, and this is the first time she ever had assistants to, which was interesting. She was willing to let go of everything. And they would move the thing around and then she'd throw another bucket of paint on another part of the mold and would just keep doing this. If it didn't look good, she'd teach her assistants and say, oh, you're trying to sabotage me now. And she didn't throw it out. She just kept making these throws and having the turn. And then we're adjusting the tape on the mold until she got what she wanted. But even then, like Paul said, we didn't really know what it was going to look like. They'd have to. And as I said, it looked like she was wrestling an alligator. I mean, it was a primitive, very hands-on way of making art. I mean, it was just, it required tremendous physical strength. And then also, as Paul said, she was working intuitively, which was not. This was like a first for her, but she was so precise in the past. And working with making these discretionary decisions moment to moment, because he said, you have to. You can't make anything happen in that. I mean, you know, so it was a highly intuitive process that would take hours. So as you look at the 10 or 15 years of paperwork that that Haramillo made, do you see a kind of narrative arc? She begins doing one thing, builds one kind of idea into a composition, moving towards something different? Do you see her learning? Do you see her trying new ideas? Well, certainly, I think from the physical making of these papers, she was learning. I mean, no one had ever made papers that big before. And so she just kind of kept expanding her knowledge of the medium itself and getting doing more and more to it. But I also think that there's enough things going on in the art world at that time that they, what she was always interested in ancient cultures and geography and the earth, and that the first images were so delicate and fragile. They were heartbreaking. They really were. And it was, they were more like ancient maps or something. And as they got bigger and thicker, you wouldn't know there were like 17 to 23 layers of paper in there because they were pressed down twice because they want one ton machine that pressed all of the water out and it would take five days or so for them to dry. And you would get this thin thing. It was actually, the later ones were actually quite strong. And that's one of the reasons she used linen. She said they were like shields in a way. And so I think as she experimented more with the medium itself, I think there are more personal components that went into the actual pieces as well. And I talk about that in the essay, everything from, I think some of the really interesting artists of the time were all doing these experiments without necessarily thinking about the end result ahead of time. It was more about we're tired of painting. Let's try something else. And there was increasing concern with the world and what was going on, as I mentioned, AIDS was New York was the AIDS capital of the western world. And you had everything process art, which Virginia could certainly sit in that group, although she really hates the thought of belonging to any group. She's very, very private. There was also earth, certainly earth art, whatever you want to call it. I would make her part of that group, but in a very different way, in that she was using just the most primitive of material. She wasn't going out and blasting through a volcano or anything like that. But it was very earth-related. Let me jump in there because you argue in your catalog essay that elements of Heramillo's work recall the work of particularly two artists who were concerned with human impacts on the land and the degradation of the built environment. And I wanted to start with Emmett Gown. How do you see Heramillo's work made it to you, Donne, as being in dialogue with Emmett Gown's aerial views of, say, the 1980s? I was a curator myself and bought a lot of photographs. I always liked Gown one. And his work was very realistic in the very beginning, pictures of his family and other things. When he started doing the aerial photographs, and it took him years to get permission to fly over the sites he wanted to fly over, you know, I look at them and you can't really tell what you're looking at. I mean, you kind of, some of them are beautiful. Then you find out he's actually photographing toxic waste dumps. And it took him years to get permission from the government to fly over old missile sites. But when you're looking at these aerial photographs, you don't know, you don't know what you're looking at. And it's like, oh, they're fascinating. There's like scars, but they're beautiful. And it's like you really don't know what they are. And they're abstract. They're really abstract imagery. And I looked at all of his that I could see. And I thought they related to Virginia's work in that, you know, there's something going on there, you know, there's something underneath the surface. But you don't know what it is, but you want to kind of dig down. And Gowan said that even if the surface of the earth has been contaminated, is damaged, you know, there's always something underneath that's animated. I get the same feeling from looking at his photographs that I did, looking at Virginia. And also they were they were dealing with the same subject matter in way, but in totally different media. So that was my response. And you know, when I went to write write the essay for Virginia, she didn't know who Emmett Galen was. She hadn't seen these works. That's amazing. Because the pictorial similarity between, say, her paper works of the early 90s, and how they build color into a suggestive topography. And his work, which is flattening aerially, right, topography are pretty strikingly similar. Well, that's that's what I felt. Yeah. And I think, you know, I think there was a zeitgeist at that time, a certain truth, true feeling with earth and dealing with the degradation of the planet and the earth. And I think a number of artists were dealing with that. But in, but they were very kind of classic artists. Nobody else was doing, nobody else did what Galen did. I mean, certainly there are plenty of aerial photographs, but they're not his or mysterious. William Garnett is the other artist who comes to mind who was a photographer who worked aerially in the 60s and seven, I guess 80s too, that came to mind. And of course, Steichen going back to World War II, although I got to admit, I haven't seen any of those Steichen's in a heck of a long time. But maybe they were like up in MoMA something or something in 1987. I don't know. I probably should have looked. Why didn't I think of that before now? I don't even know who you're talking about. So you're still a couple of steps ahead of me. Oh, Edward Steichen. Oh, Edward Steichen, yeah. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I bought a number of his pieces too. But I think he was, you know, I think of Steichen as playing on a formal level. And in a way, he could have been one of the picture artists in a way, because he was playing with the reality of what we're looking at. But I think I don't think that's what Galen was doing. I mean, I think Galen was actually doing forms of expose that people would look at because they are immediately so, you know, arresting. I don't think he was trying to fool people in the end. Another artist you raised in your essay that was interested in these issues around the built environment and degradation and decay that you think Harameo may have been looking at or thinking of is Gordon Matta Clark. And once I started looking at some Matta Clark's of, say, the West side of Manhattan, the compositional similarities just kind of jumped out. Do we know if Harameo was looking at Matta Clark? And if so, why? No, she wasn't looking at it, which was kind of funny because he actually started this great little coffee shop in Soho that Virginia went to all the time, because she was in that hood, right? But she didn't even remember his work, or no, she didn't really. I mean, Matta Clark, I mean, I was around, I mean, I was there. And when I first heard of him, I thought, well, this is crazy. I mean, you couldn't, I never saw any, except in images. I never went to any of his actual houses that he was carving up. I just remember first thinking, what's he doing? And why is he doing that? And Virginia didn't, Virginia really kept to herself. She really did. I mean, she lived across the street from Donald Judd, and her kids would go to Donald Dudson right around on her tricycle and Judd studio, but she really was her own person and didn't want to be affected by anybody else. So she didn't, she wasn't really too thrilled, I think, that I referred to Matta Clark. I never looked at him or saw what he was doing. I said, I know, but there's something about his work, particularly, see, I bought some of his work and I bought Gallon's work also that had that compression, that feeling of compression, as you know, from his, Prince or the photographs. That was really, I thought similar to Virginia's work, this compression. And you know their layers and you see their exits and entries and they're scarring and there's like, it's like, what's going, you can't, you don't really know like with, with what is going on here. You what if he saw the actual sculpture? I mean, that he did, that he had, you know, buzz sawed up. And then I'm reading more about him though, he also, like Alan, and like Virginia was concerned about just the denaturing of the environment, the denaturing of, because let's remember AIDS was going on then full blown, the denaturing of the human body and the culture itself. And I felt they all had those things in common, even if they'd never met, even if Virginia, they didn't know each other's work. I felt there was that kind of zeitgeist that was very questioning and also painful as to what was happening. But mad at, to this day, I remember when I turned in the essay, the curator, nobody, nobody remembered who mad at Clark was. Nobody knew the artist I was writing about. I just happened to be old and have knew these things and realized that there was this, as I said, this kind of zeitgeist that was going on then. I mean, these were very turbulent times, and everything, so many things were being questioned, as you know, whether it was the environment or cultures or the art world itself. I got Rosalind Kraus's book and she was like the doyenne of the, you know, cognizantie back then. And I just really couldn't, I really couldn't stand her. But what she did in her book was take a year at a time in American art and talk about what was the most important thing that happened in, you know, 1901, 1902, etc., etc., all the way up through the century. And she did not mention, for instance, pattern and decoration or anything that could be text, you know, textile, nothing. That was very East Coast. And here are these great artists, you know, going out, I mean, they didn't care who the gatekeepers were, because there were still gatekeepers then, and they didn't care about the gatekeepers. Virginia said, I did what I did because I had to do it. I had to do it. And she had to come up with a lot of money, which she didn't have then, to rent the the paper mill, Giudone for like a three-day of her week at a time. And she said, you'd have to wait months before she had enough money to do it again. I mean, it literally cost her. And Giudone had to spend years petitioning the government to fly over the areas that he wanted to photograph. I mean, he could have photographed anything, barely, if he wanted, but he wanted these particular landscapes. And I think Man of Clark was literally sort of taking his own life in his hands when he was doing what he was doing. So these were all artists who had to work very hard to do what they did. It wasn't easy, and they weren't particularly. I mean, I think Man of Clark was very much part of the avant-garde, and I think of Virginia as she just got those paper pieces of hers got dismissed. I mean, I know now she's with a big-time gallery that was right down the street from Douglas Drake, and while we were showing her pieces, you'd have artists like Hiki Smith show up and say, "Oh my God, these pieces are incredible." But they were being picketed by the real girls because they never even showed they have no women artists. Well, the gallery of that paperwork at the M.C. Chicago now looks absolutely terrific. Elizabeth Kirsch, thanks so much. Oh, thank you, Tyler, for... I'm just so glad that you saw Virginia's paperwork and liked them. Thank you so much. That's all for this week's show. The Modern Art Notes podcast is edited by Wilson Butterworth. Special thanks to Steve Roden, who created the sound for the program. The Modern Art Notes podcast is released under a Creative Commons license. Please visit Modern Art Notes for more information. Thanks for listening.
