REVOLT, THEY SAID. 1 a Project by Andrea Geyer
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REVOLT, THEY SAID. 1 a project by Andrea Geyer INSTALLATION MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK Ida York Abelman (1908–2002) was a highly regarded Social OCTOBER 16th - NOVEMBER 27th 2015 Realist, known for the graphic work that she produced for the various Federal Art Projects in New York during the Depression. BIOGRAPHIES FOR DRAWING Her etchings and lithographs of the 1930s depict the difficult living conditions endured by many. Abelman also completed two murals for the Federal Art Projects: Lewiston Milestones in Lewiston, Illinois, and Booneville Beginnings in Booneville, Indiana, both extant. Her art training included the National Academy of Design, Grand Central Art School, College of the City of New York, and Hunter College, all in New York City. She was a member of the American Artists Congress and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum Louise Abbéma (1853–1927) was an artist known for her of American Art, and the Berkshire Museum, Massachusetts, portraits of notable figures of the Belle Époque, including among other venues. Her work is the collections of numerous Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil, architect Charles Garnier, and museums as well as the Library of Congress. actress Sarah Bernhardt. Bernhardt and Abbéma were lovers and exhibited artworks together at the 1893 World’s Columbian Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–1977) was an American Exposition in Chicago. Abbéma was a regular exhibitor at the painter. She spent much of her childhood traveling Europe with Paris Salon and regular contributor to the journals Gazette des her parents who toured with an opera company. The outbreak of Beaux-Arts and L’Art. Many of Abbéma’s paintings depict World War I forced the family to move back to Chicago, where women dressed androgynously and participating in intellectual she would spend the rest of her adolescence. She was deeply activities typically reserved for men at the time. rooted in Chicago and the Midwest, using the landscape and landmarks of the area around the town as subjects for her art Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) was a photographer who throughout her career. Abercrombie studied part-time after documented the ever-changing aspects city life, culture, and graduation at the American Academy of Art and the School of architecture. Born in Springfield, Ohio, she moved to the Art Institute, and was appointed to the Public Works of Art Greenwich Village in 1918 and worked in journalism, theater, Project (the first of the government supported arts programs) in and sculpture, surrounded by influential artists and writers such 1933. At this time she began to exhibit at the Art Institute as Djuna Barnes. She moved to Paris to study sculpture and in Annuals and galleries in both Chicago and New York, and to 1927 opened her own photography studio. There Abbott made develop the characteristic personal style that defines her work. her name as a portrait photographer of the social elite, many of She hosted a Chicago Salon including jazz musicians, writers, whom were gay and lesbian. During a brief visit to New York, and artist and she presided imperiously as the self-appointed Abbott became interested in photographing the changes in the “Queen of Chicago.” The oft-repeated moon, cats, barren tree, city, and she returned in 1929. Her Changing New York (1935– owls, Victorian furniture, white stoneware, and carnations, all 1938) was an expansive sociological study of urban life sponsored take on the power of personal emblems in her work and testify to by the Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Project. A her presence even in the absence of a figure. Abercrombie used member of the straight photography movement, Abbott insisted painting to manage her world and the psychic pain that she that her photographs not be manipulated thematically or admittedly suffered. She transformed her internal conflicts into technologically. In 1935 she began sharing a loft with art critic works of great power, mystery, and resonance. Elizabeth McCausland who became one of her biggest supporters and with whom she lived for 30 years. The Museum of Modern Wilhelmina F. Adams (1900–1987) was a political and civil Art, New York, presented a major retrospective of Abbott’s work rights activist for African Americans and women in New York in 1970. City. Her fundraising talents were honed while serving as vice REVOLT, THEY SAID. 2 a project by Andrea Geyer president of the Utopia Neighborhood Club in the early 1920s, decades before the Surrealists did similar experiments. where she successfully raised the down payment on the Utopia Throughout her career Af Klimt equally paired a thrive for Children’s House. In 1930 Adams organized the Aeolian Ladies scientific accuracy with a heightened aesthetic insight. Beginning of Charity because of her concern with Harlem’s “forgotten in the mid-1890s, she gradually moved from figuration toward aged.” Soon after, she succeeded in bringing Guy Lombardo, a abstraction and can be considered the first abstract painter. She world-renowned orchestra leader, to Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom. aimed to perceive a reality beyond the visible. Between 1906 and Adams held several memberships in arts organizations and 1915 she created Paintings for the Temple: 193 paintings in became chairman of the finance committee of the Gibson various formats, divided into groups and subgroups similar to Committee Relief Fund, which preceded the advent of public the organization of scientific research. “The pictures were welfare. In that capacity, she became the first woman of color painted directly through me,” she said, “without any preliminary permitted the use of a booth in the main arcade of Grand drawings and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings Central Station. were supposed to depict, nevertheless, I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brushstroke.” The work forms a Jane Addams (1860–1935) was a philosopher, visionary social cosmology, conveying a oneness beyond the world of polarities reformer, author, and proponent of world peace and women’s we perceive in everyday life. Expansive and detailed notebooks of suffrage. A pioneering advocate for the rights of immigrants, The Five survived which attempted to record and analyze the women, and young people, she fought for better women’s processes of which the paintings were a result. According to the education, better living and working conditions for laborers, and artist’s will, these and others of her abstract works were not to be comprehensive labor reform. In 1889 Addams started Hull exhibited until at least twenty years following her death. Af Klimt House in Chicago with Ellen Gates Starr, a college friend and believed her contemporaries were not yet ready to grasp their her intimate partner for many years. Offering various cultural meaning. She died in 1944 at age 81. resources such as an art gallery, book bindery, and drama club, Hull House also ran a night school, girls’ club, and library. Eileen Forrester Agar (1899–1991) was a British painter and Addams’s idea of night classes for adults has served as a model for photographer associated with the Surrealist movement. Born in contemporary continuing education and public recreation Buenos Aires to a Scottish father and American mother, Agar programs, and her theories and practice of social reform have moved with her family to London in 1911. She attended the Slade influenced contemporary social work. Addams campaigned for School of Fine Art in London and continued her art studies in the Progressive Party, the Women’s Peace Party and the Women’s Paris. Agar joined the London Group in 1933, and her work was International League for Peace and Freedom. In 1931 Addams selected for the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New was the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Burlington Galleries, London, in 1936. She was the only British Meanwhile J. Edgar Hoover, the founding director of the FBI, woman to participate in the exhibition. Agar’s work appeared in labeled her the “most dangerous woman in America” and Surrealist exhibitions in Paris, Amsterdam, New York, and amassed an expansive file on her. Tokyo. In 1936 she started to experiment with automatic techniques and new materials, practicing photography, collage, Hilma Af Klint (1862-1944) came into deep association with and object-making. After World War II, Agar entered a nature at an early stage in her life, while being influenced by her particularly productive phase in her career with sixteen solo father’s interest in mathematics. Her younger sister’s death exhibitions between 1946 and 1985. added an interest in Spiritual matters. After the family’s move to Stockholm, Af Klimt studied at the Academy of Fine Arts for five Delia Julia Akeley (1875–1970) was an African explorer, big years, becoming part of the first generation of women who game hunter, and writer. She went on five African expeditions in studied there on equal terms with men. After participating in her lifetime, two on her own initiative. In 1923 she led an séances as early as the late 1870s, she founded the group The Five expedition for the Brooklyn Museum traveling through with four other women artists (A.Cassel, S.Hedman, unexplored regions of the Belgian Congo, where she made C.Cederberg and Matilde N.). Collectively they practiced contact with the notoriously shy Pygmy tribes . Her sole automatic writing and drawing during weekly Friday séances, two companions were Africans she selected and trained as assistants. REVOLT, THEY SAID. 3 a project by Andrea Geyer Akeley theorized that a female expeditor who immersed herself in 1950s working on mass-producible fabric patterns, creating the the community could establish close relationships with the local majority of her “pictorial” weavings, and publishing a half-dozen women and gather authentic and valuable information articles and On Designing, a collection of her writings.