Why I’m Not a Narrative Painter

Every so often, a gallery owner or collector will ask me if I do narrative paintings. I really don’t if you go by the usual definition of the genre, and having to explain what I do paint has prompted me to really examine why I make the art I make.  

This then, is a very personal reflection on that, and also the even larger issues of what art is about, what it does, and how I perceive the world I live in. Some of the ideas I’m going to talk about have come from collectors I’ve known, who have a deep understanding of art, born of their love of it. A lot of what I’m going to say here are ideas that I use to remind myself of where my focus needs to be in developing work. I’ll be speaking of painting because I am a painter, but I think what I’m going to say applies to almost all visual art. Each artist needs to apply it as their nature is so inclined.What this is all about is content in art. 

The narrative genre is widely understood to be the artist basically painting a story. A story that has a setting and characters and action that happens in time and leads to some result. In the case of a painting, if the narrative is culturally familiar, like a myth or an historic event, the artist chooses the scene that is most representative of the story or the most significant to recall the action. If the narrative is invented or involving concepts like surrealism, the artist provides clues that the viewer interprets. The big conceptual challenge is overcoming the fact that painting lacks the element of time.

Narrative Painting 

Before going further, let me talk about a couple of narrative paintings using the elements of narrative (time, place, characters, action, and meaning) in order to  provide a backdrop  for talking about content. Both were painted between 1935 and 1945 in America.

The first painting is Norman Rockwell’s, “Freedom of Speech”. As with almost all of Rockwell’s work, it was painted to be an illustration, a cover for the Saturday Evening Post magazine in 1943, at the height of  World War II. I chose an illustration to start, because illustrators tend to become illustrators because they are essentially story tellers by nature and paint to speak to the widest possible audience. They also paint for strong impact and are skilled at holding the attention of the viewer.

In the painting, the main figure, a “working man” is standing to speak at some kind of important, formal meeting, and because everyone is holding booklets, the subject is something complicated that’s going to effect the whole community. The intended message, which can be gotten even without the title is that every man (in America) can speak his mind and be heard.

In many ways, this is an incredibly well constructed painting and also, a very manipulative work, carrying a powerful message at the time, and beautifully designed to support the magazine’s brand image by playing to their readership. It is wonderfully painted, and during his life, Rockwell was admired by the public for his facility as much as for the vision he presented of an idealized America.    

Time

The biggest challenge any narrative painter has is creating time. It is the biggest difference between art and music. Music exists in time. I frequently think of music and art as sisters who are jealous of each other. Music is jealous of art because she has a physical form, and art is jealous of music because she has time.  

An artist creates time, by finding ways of keeping the viewer engaged with the work. Composition is important for a narrative painter. The composition has to lead the viewer around, keeping them curious and wanting to see and find more. Faces are the thing that people are drawn to look at the most and the faces here are designed to take you from one to the other. They are all looking at the speaker. You can’t help but wonder what the woman’s thinking, and even causing me to stop and wonder is a clever way of adding time.  

The Cast

The speaker is given a hero’s treatment. He stands tall, his head framed by the dark background, maybe a school blackboard. (The magazine’s name would surround it in print). He is dressed in work clothes and seems to have come from work. He’s read the document and has it rolled up in his pocket, giving the feeling he doesn’t need to refer to it. He’s got it all figured out. 

He’s handsome and the typical movie star version of an ideal man. His eyes are a light, bright blue, giving them a visionary quality. He’s young and his hands are large, worn from work, and strong. They are the hands of a doer. They are placed  firmly on the back of the bench, a stand-in for his feet, firmly planted on the  ground. People are listening intently and respectfully, reinforced by the ear of the partially visible man in the lower left corner. In every way, he is purposely designed to be an iconic picture of the everyman subscriber to The Post and a symbol for the dignity of the common man.

Most narrative art is made for a distinct purpose, as an entertainment, as a call to action, to inspire, and inform. One downside to narrative paintings, and especially illustrations, is that they can become dated, the more likely to do so when the purpose is relating to a social cause. In the Rockwell painting, for instance, notice that there is only one woman in the painting and she’s crammed behind the men. In 1940s America, the men made decisions about important matters. Also notice the lack of any racial or ethnic diversity. Both of these, in addition to the dress of the crowd, date the painting and place it in a specific time. There’s nothing wrong with this, and a great many narrative painters’ main interest is to give a picture of life in their own or different times and eras. Think of the work of Renoir, Goya, Hopper, Peale, Ingres, Vermeer, and Van Eyck. In fact there are certain things about life in past times that we only know from the art. Most musical instruments before the 1600s are only known by being pictured in art, including the instrument with the unfortunate name, Sackbut. 

Next let’s look at a painting by the self-taught, black artist, Horace Pippin—“John Brown on the Way to His Hanging” 

Horace Pippin | John Brown on the Way to His Hanging

John Brown was an antislavery crusader in the 1850s. He was a  charismatic man, mercurial in temperament, and a man with a powerful moral resentment to the enslavement of black people. He was capable of inspiring followers and also of brutal violence when it suited his aims. He attempted a raid on an ammunition facility at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), which failed. He was wounded and captured by troops led by Robert E. Lee, tried and hanged as a traitor on December 2, 1859. His insurrection and death contributed to dividing the nation and in part contributed to the beginning of the American Civil War. 

Odd coincidences surround his death and fame. John Wilkes Booth, the future assassin of Abraham Lincoln was in attendance at Brown’s execution, as was Horace Pippin’s grandmother, herself a former slave. Union troops adopted a song, “John Brown’s Body” which they sang marching into battle, and which eventually morphed into “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. 

Artists were fascinated with him and he appeared in artwork throughout the early 20th Century. Including these pieces.    

I am purposely contrasting Horace Pippin with Norman Rockwell . They both painted at the same time. Whereas Rockwell was famous for his technical brilliance and romanticized, sometimes sentimental images. Pippin was self taught. His paintings are straight forward. There is no attempt to purposely manipulate the viewer. He presents the story in a way that lets you enter, free to experience the scene as though it were just happening. I’ve always admired his lack of pretense. He has a tendency to present objects in their most characteristic view, to me vaguely reminiscent of the the way Ancient Egyptian artists did. Both of these self portraits have a natural, unaffected quality to them, a quality that many highly trained artists have to struggle to achieve, and are rarely successful. 

In the painting, John Brown is on his way to the gallows. As history records, he is sitting on his coffin, bound at the elbows so that his forearms are free and is accompanied by the jailers and soldiers.  

Most narrative paintings provide a place for the viewer to stand or sit. Here, we are standing at the back of the crowd, at some distance. It’s an interesting choice, making me wonder if it’s to be able to include more of the scene, or are we standing further back because of the intensity of the event?  Even John Brown is facing away from us.There is almost no color in the painting except for the blue dress of the black woman in the lower right corner. And, she is the only person fully facing us.  

She is clearly frowning and distressed, and I’m certain that even though the subject of the painting is John Brown’s execution, she’s the focal point. She is the one casting the final judgement of what’s happening. She is the face of historic judgement, the face of future generations looking on. Unlike the Rockwell painting, and partly because this is a famous and actual historic event, the painting holds up better and feels more authentic from a message point of view.

This leads me to what I think content in art really is. 

Content in Art

For me, the content of all art is the experience of feeling and emotion. I start by saying this, because based on work I see and statements by artists, I suspect that many artists consider the content of their work to be the subject of a work, what they are actually painting or sculpting. But what a viewer actually gets is an experience, based on the image, the way the image is realized in the material, and the complex psychological mechanisms activated, all occurring in time. The content is aesthetic in nature, filtered through each person’s reality and then interpreted in ways relevant to a person’s life, what we think of as meaning in art. I tend to make a personal distinction between feeling and emotion in the way I think artists approach making art and how viewers experience it. 

The Science of Emotion

For psychologists, emotions deal with conscious thoughts and reasoning. They are located in the mind. Feelings are the conscious experience of emotional reactions and are felt in the body. Emotions pass quickly, feelings last longer, sometimes for decades. There is also a link between thought and emotion. Thoughts create emotions, and the reverse is true as well. Emotions create thoughts. It’s a constant circle. 

Looking at the two paintings again, what emotions you are feeling? A lot will depend on who you identify with, but, whatever emotions and feelings you have will shape the meaning you get from the work.  

Though we are mostly unaware of it, this unconscious link between emotion and thought is always with us, and is the engine behind the effectiveness of all forms of media, as well as advertising and marketing. It is the reason for a lot of what we consume beyond the necessities of life. And in fact, hunger, sex, the desire for personal validation, and our hunger for love drive more of our spending than we realize.

My Personal View

Because I tend to view the world from the perspective of an artist, my understanding of the distinction between feeling and emotion is more metaphoric. Feelings are the place where I live, like the landscape, and emotions come and go like the weather. Feelings and emotions are what give me the sense of being alive and make living worthwhile. The experiences I have with art tend to transport me out of the activity of self validation that I constantly live with, into a state where I just live. From my perspective, art’s function and importance centers on its focusing us on this sense of living. It’s like a vitamin pill for our psychic and spiritual life. 

Creating the Experience in Art

I think that an important starting place for creating experience, is to remember that art and the reality of life are not the same thing. For an artist to create a work that carries feeling and emotion, the material of their life needs to be transformed into a kind of visual poetry that will offer feeling to anyone open to it. The transformation comes as a result of the imaginative exploration of images using the vocabulary of the world of vision, all according to the artist’s unique nature and instincts.

It’s important for an artist to know and understand their own particular path from inspiration to poetry. This understanding introduces process into an artist’s practice and helps create a consistency of vision to their work. The inspiration may change over time, but if the process remains consistent, the work will still align with their previous work and reflect a consistent vision. 

Since I’m most familiar with my own process, I’ll use an example of my own work to show how this transformation can take place.

Is like…

There are two signs in my studio that help me in my daily work. One says, “Just Start”, because starting is always the hardest part for me. Once I start working, I’m past the hesitation, fears, and procrastination that can claim a day before I know it. The other sign says, “Is Like”, which reminds me by referring to the use of simile, that the goal is not to paint the literal image, but rather its poetic substance. It reminds me to ask myself what I can do to help people see in a new way.

That poetic substance usually presents itself to me in a flash of recognition. I’ll catch something out of the corner of my eye. The subject doesn’t have to be something grand, and is more likely to be something quite ordinary or familiar which I suddenly see in a new way. It could be an expression on a person’s face or the shape of an object that takes on an unfamiliar form. Most often however, it has to do with the way light is playing on the subject that reveals it to me in a new and unexpected way. 

I work from photographs now after decades of working from life, mainly because it gives me a chance to catch these fleeting glimpses that inspire me and also because it makes it possible to use Photoshop to amplify and clarify the aspects of the subject that I want to paint. The photo below is a good example of how the process begins to unfold for me. 

I was shooting photos of some peonies that a friend had brought me for possible use as painting subjects. I was photographing them using natural light that was coming through one of the studio windows. The day was cloudy and so the light was very consistent and even. All at once, the sun burst through a cloud and a ray of light came through the window and landed on the center of the flower. I quickly got that feeling of seeing the kind of glimpse I look for and shot this photograph. Almost as soon as I took the picture, the beam of light vanished. The moment was that fast. 

I think the photo itself is mysterious and beautiful, and I’m always asking myself if what I’m seeing is really a stand-alone photograph or the subject for a painting. They are different to me. Either the inherent properties of photography match the the image well, or I see the possibility of it being made more expressive by its being transformed using any number of means open to the painting process — creating a stronger graphic structure, manipulation of the color, the paint handling, the “thingness” that a painting has as a physical object, or the potential for creating the sense of felt space and presence that only a painting can do. 

While I might handle this subject differently now (this was seven years ago), this painting opened the door to seeing something that I see in almost everything I paint now. An inner light, an inner life. The flower seemed to illuminate the world around it, and its undulating forms began to be patterns of flow the way hair and flags move in a breeze. This made the painting not so much about a flower, but about something else. The final painting below shows how I chose to create this poetic view, clarifying a structure and creating a center of light that would act as a wheel, allowing the undulating forms of the petals to have a center of gravity. It’s as if the light came from inside the flower rather than from outside it. 

Photo

Painting

So, what does all of this have to do with narrative painting? 

Simply put, I think that all painting is narrative. Because of the way we mark time by events and assemble cause-and-effect scenarios for these events, we can’t help but hang our world on narrative. The question then, is who is creating the narrative, the artist or the viewer? And, how can an artist fit their style of narrative painting to their way of being in the world? From describing the two paintings at the beginning, it’s clear that I like narrative paintings, but I don’t make narrative paintings myself, because I don’t see the world that way. 

With narrative paintings, I enter them through my mind, through a thinking process, in some ways closer to the way I experience literature. I decode the image and reconstruct a scenario. In some cases, I need some background in order to fully participate in what the event is. In some ways, I’m as dependent on the title of the painting as the painting itself for experience. I have to think it before I feel it.

I tend to experience the world in almost the opposite way. I feel it and then think it. I live the experience most fully when it comes directly from my senses rather than through my mind, my thinking. On my own, in my most private place, this direct connection to my senses is where I tend to spend my time.

I’m essentially a shy person and someone who has always spent a great deal of time by myself. I like being with people one-on-one, and  I tend to see things one at a time. My gaze will fall on something that fascinates me, and I’ll be with it. It could be a flower, a face, the way the light falls on the oriental carpet in the living room. It’s all very interior. And so, this is the kind of art I want to make. Art that reflects my way of seeing the world.

Ironically, I do almost the exact opposite of what narrative painters do. Whether it is a painting of a nude, or a portrait or a simple bowl. I try to take time out of it, and I leave as much room as possible for the viewer to put it all back in. In each of these paintings, I feel as though I’ve put only as much as is necessary for the viewer to begin to make their own narrative out of what they are feeling.

I’ve often told about remembering the experience of learning to tie my shoes. I don’t know how old I was, but I have a very clear memory of it… making the loops and carefully pulling them, making sure everything was aligned, until they were tight. The memory centers on how it made me feel, the emotion I had. I remember being elated that I could do it. And over the years, I’ve come to think of this as an “I can” moment. And, I’ve also come to believe that these are an important part of being human and in many ways, how we create the people we are. When we have those I can moments in something we love doing, it’s tremendously satisfying. We are in the act of making and remaking ourselves, over and over. It’s the ageless part of us. When we focus on that, the world can be a better place.

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Thomas Wharton studied at The Art Student’s League of New York, The New York Studio School, The New York Academy of Art, The Grand Central Academy, Parsons, School of Visual Arts, and The National Academy of Design. His work has won many awards, including The West Virginia Governor’s Award, The Georgie Read Barton Award, The Katlin Seascape Award (twice), the Windsor Newton Award, and the Richard C. Pionk Memorial Prize for Painting. He has been included in the Art Renewal Center’s Annual Salon, and his portrait work has been awarded a Certificate of Excellence by The Portrait Society of America, where he now has been given Signature Status.

He has shown at the National Arts Club in New York, The Salmagundi Club, the Dacia Gallery, the West Virginia University Museum of Art, The West Virginia Cultural Center, Tamatack, Stifel Fine Arts, ETC., the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art, the RJD Gallery, Ille Arts Gallery, the Christine Frechard Gallery, and the Nutting Gallery. His work is included in the permanent Cultural Archives of the state of West Virginia, and his children’s book art is included in the permanent collection the the Mazza Museum of International Children’s Book Art. His paintings have been included many publications, including American Art Collector, Fine Art Connoisseur, International Artist, and Poets and Artists magazines, Whitehot Magazine, as well as the book, 21st Century Figurative Art: The Resurrection of Art. His paintings can be found in private and institutional collections throughout the United States.

In addition to his work as a fine artist, he has had a distinguished and successful career as a designer, illustrator, art director and creative director. His clients have included Cambridge University Press, Citibank, MasterCard, the New York Stock Exchange, Lifetime Television, Starwood Hotels, Clarins, Shiseido, Simon & Schuster, and New York University. His paintings are available from 33 Contemporary, Chicago.

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Make It Real

Curated by David Willson (IBEX Collection).
Introduction and commentary written by David Willson.

We all know and talk about how art is subjective.

However, it is not until you are asked to select the ‘best’ of a number of submissions, that you are really challenged on that subjectivity.

In selecting what I consider to be the ‘best’ pieces I was very aware of the disappointment those not chosen were likely to feel, the feelings of ‘why not me?’ and maybe frustration at being overlooked.

What I have selected is my highly personal view of the ‘best’ pieces that were presented. I am also very aware that if I had the chance to stand in front of all of the physical pieces, I may feel differently about them, but digital is what we had to work with here.

I can see the care, effort and personal meaning that each of these pieces has to the artists who created them, and not being selected just means that they did not fit what I was looking for, not that they do not have worth.

So, what was I looking for?

In looking at art, personally I am always looking for works that have something to say, a purpose or meaning that resonates with me, or that I can see would resonate with other people, even if it is not my cup of tea. 

I am also looking for a degree of technical expertise in the execution, such that the work does what it needs to to best present that message. I am strongly drawn to artists who have such strong command over their skill that they can execute nearly perfectly on their concept. 

The marriage of concept and technical ability can create great works.

In addition to the above, I am very much looking for pieces that reflect this moment in time. Not pieces that are just painting a fad, but pieces that know we are in the 21st century and not the 19th or 20th. This is usually expressed through a combination of style, colour choices, lighting and most especially body-language. I like to see art that has developed ‘on the shoulders of the giants who came before’ and that speaks to us in the era in which we are living.

Hopefully you will see that expressed in the chosen artworks.

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Doug Webb – Salt of the Earth

I wish that I had a dollar for every time that I and the other IBEX Collectors have discussed how important the title of a painting is. Doug’s clever title gave me an excellent starting point for thinking about this painting. 

The composition is excellent. The unexpected sizes provided immediate interest, while the background choice of a church and an American flag gave me reason to assume that this is far more than just a whimsical painting. Of course, this was helped by the fact that the skill displayed here allows for the story to be very clearly told, and I am not distracted by a failure of technique (in fact, quite the opposite).

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Alexandra Manukayn – Gnasher

What can I say? Sometimes I stray into enjoying the whimsical.

I enjoyed this piece because it moves away from the typical portraits of children where their youth is (I feel) overly bathed in ‘the innocence of youth’. I liked seeing this expression of playfulness, even mischief, that struck me as authentic.

This is the kind of portrait that I personally would want of my son at that age, rather than the typical on their best behaviour perfect young child portrait.

Of course, it also helps that, as usual, Alexandra’s execution shows her experience and mastery of her art.

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Grant Gilsdorf – Middle Fingers Up

In full disclosure, we have two paintings by Grant already in our collection, however I believe that all of his art is strong enough to stand on its own merit and to justify itself.

What I like about this piece (and almost all pieces by Grant) is a very keen sense of the present moment. There is a freshness and authenticity to this piece that I love, and when combined with excellent technical skills, the overall effect is a very strong one.

One of the things that I especially like about this painting is that it is brave enough to be fully authentic. 

It is quite popular now to show ‘interesting’ or hipster looking Millennials in paintings, however many times I feel that they are presented as interesting only by virtue of their tattoos, piercings etc. They are often boring portraits of interesting people being almost entirely non-expressive. They are often missing the body language that I would expect to go with that person. Grant does not shy away from allowing free expression of his subjects, wherever that takes him.

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Pegah Samaie – Defiance

I love feeling that there is a story behind a painting. Even better if it is strong enough that I would really like to know what that story is.

Defiance is such a painting. The title gives a great starting insight into what is going on here, but I soon found that it only scratched the surface. 

I may have found the core imagery of the painting a little heavy handed, if I was not almost immediately drawn to the windows in the background of the painting that seem to point to a much deeper background and nuanced story than would otherwise be the case. I ended up spending quite a lot of time with this painting and it became more and more interesting the longer I spent with it.

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Anne-Marie Zanetti – Always Another Way

Another painting that looks like it belongs in the present moment and that has been skillfully executed.

This is a strong painting, with extra layers.

I enjoyed very much the bold colours and the strong character of the subject. I do not know what issues she is facing, as implied by the title of the painting, but I have no doubt that she will find that “other way”.

I also enjoyed the touch of romanticism and optimism found in the flowers reflected in the rose-coloured-glasses.

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Arina Gordienko – Life in Crimson Flame

Arina knows so well how to use strong reds to create bold and interesting paintings that elevate them beyond common portraits.

Clearly Arina has achieved a very high level in her technique and is at a stage where she is able to clearly and cleanly express whatever it is that she wishes to say through her subjects.

In this case, I was arrested by the depth of the subject for this painting. There is a fully-realised person here, who has complex emotions and multiple layers behind her surface expression that make me want to delve deeper and spend time getting to know the painting. There is minimal artifice or artificial portraiture here, beyond the typical masks that we all present, and that speaks very strongly to me.

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AN OFFER FROM DAVID WILLSON

If you were one of the artists who entered MAKE IT REAL and you are a member of the IBEX Art Insiders group on Facebook (which you can freely join) and you would like to discuss your work with me, I would be happy to do so. If that is the case, please just let Sthef know to give you priority for the next round of monthly one-on-ones we run.

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LINKS

Viewing Room @Artsy

IBEX COLLECTION

IBEX INSIDER GROUP

PoetsArtists Facebook Group

Covid Subway Drawings by Devon Rodriguez

Devon Rodriguez is known for his subway oil paintings of unsuspecting subjects. He is now taken to drawing live while on the subway. Here is a TikTok showing his process.

Devon Rodriguez (@devonrodriguezart) has created a short video on TikTok with music Coffee for Your Head. | Another day, another soul #drawing #nycsubway #fyp #foryoupage | Drawing a stranger on the NYC subway | Tap the + to watch me draw one everyday

“My work is about documenting the world around me, typically on the NYC Subway. My job is not to direct reality, but to let reality direct me. I like to remain hyper aware to what’s going on around me. I try not to disturb my subject in any way. The last thing I’d do is ask someone to allow me to photograph them for a painting. I like to be patient, and just hope that the world around me will reward me with deep and soulful incidents and characters. Painting what I see helps me understand the world around me.

I often like to paint big works. To me, this makes the image feel very familiar and normal, as if you’re sitting in front of the subject in your everyday life. Sometimes my paintings are interpreted as invasive, but it doesn’t stop my admiration for people, sometimes very unusual people. ”

— Devon Rodriguez

The drawings are available to buy right from his website and they are $500 each. They are selling out so hurry.

Devon’s artwork is currently exhibiting in the Smithsonian and his Subway paintings have been featured throughout New York subways and been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times.

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Interview with Elizabeth A. Sackler

On April 25, 2017 I sat down with one of my Sheros, Elizabeth Sackler, an activist for social justice, equity and equality. Elizabeth is deeply involved in the social justice communities and adds fuel to far reaching feminist action.  She is the founder and president of the American Indian Ritual Object Repatriation Foundation and the visionary and impetus behind the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. As Judy Chicago says, ‘Elizabeth Sackler is a force to be reckoned with’. After a warm welcome we jumped right in.

VS: The ‘New Feminist’ issue of PoetsArtists wants to tap into what’s happening on the New Feminist frontier. The work being done at The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art seems to be the epicenter of rising feminist action as well as feminist art. I imagine you, Elizabeth, with your finger on the pulse and hands in the mix, bringing people together, instigating awareness and change. 

ES: A lot of my work at the museum now is feminist social action oriented. In terms of feminist art in the gallery world, I don’t work in those universes.  

VS: That’s exactly why we wanted to talk to you. For me, the Brooklyn Museum is not only focusing differently than the gallery scene but you’re redefining what it means to be a museum. The way you’re approaching activism and community involvement is redefining ‘museum’. I see the Brooklyn Museum as a ‘change agent’. 

ES: Yes it is and it is because of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center of Feminist Art. I was very fortunate to have a great partner in Arnold Lehman who was the Brooklyn Museums director at the time that I brought him my idea for the Sackler Center. That vision was not for a gallery, but for a center. There’s a difference between having a gallery where you have only art and having a center where you have everything. Where you have lectures, where you have different kinds of exhibitions and where you can really break ground. That was really my interest. 

My concept was to use Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party as the fulcrum to the center in addition to offering it permanent housing. This was for Judy a critical moment.  She said, ‘Hurrah, it’s done’ and I said, ‘No, it’s just beginning.’ Because for me, The Dinner Party is a launching pad for every conversation. The one thousand and thirty eight women of The Dinner Party represents one thousand and thirty eight disciplines. There isn’t any area of life that it doesn’t touch.  It is educating us about the past women who were feminists in their own right, even though the word didn’t exist, who were really breaking ground and doing things. Many of them of course were punished for it. Many of them were killed for it. We have this horrible history of oppression and women faced it with the grit and the will and the desire. Women who couldn’t be stopped. You can’t help it. You just go ahead. Didi Menendez, would know that. If your D.N.A. is made like that, then whatever your vision is that simply has to be and if that means change, that means change. The Dinner Party for me is a launching pad for all our programs and dialogues. 

The Sackler Center layout breaks down with the Dinner Party Gallery at its nucleus, then the Feminist Gallery, the Herstory Gallery and the Forum. The Herstory Gallery is next to The Dinner Party and historically we’ve had small exhibitions there that have been extremely important. 

Catherine J. Morris, The Sackler Center’s Senior Curator, produces more exhibitions each year than any other curator in the museum. We bring forward Herstory. 

The Herstory’s very first exhibition used pieces from the museum’s Mesopotamia collection to reflect back some of the very early women in The Dinner Party, women from Greece goddesses. It was the first time in the museums history that there had been interdepartmental loan; where one department gave art for exhibition to another. That changed the functioning of the museum. It became in what academia is called interdisciplinary.  

It was very interesting because when I signed the agreement with the Brooklyn Museum, in 2001, I didn’t expect to see changes in the museum until the Sackler Center opened. And it changed immediately, absolutely immediately. Suddenly curators were looking in storage. What had they neglected, or overlooked, or put aside? Within a year of signing the agreement the museum exhibitions started to change.  

It took four years for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art to be built; we opened in 2007. The space had housed the Brooklyn Museum costume collection and the Schenck House.  So it had to be emptied. The costume collection was gifted to the Metropolitan Museum. Which is how I knew The Brooklyn was really serious about a center for feminist art!

VS: It’s amazing that while we see you breaking down walls and shifting conversations and building connectivity on the public platform you were also doing that inside the museum.

ES: And as we were doing that the museum changed and the curators changed. It was interesting because the curators were not jealous of all the focus on the Sackler Center, to the contrary, they were extremely excited because it was new energy and it was bringing life to departments that had sort of been drifting along.

VS: Sounds like you were fascinated by what other departments could offer to Herstory and they knew you wanted to tap into them and they loved that.

ES: And they were very very excited by what we were doing. 

VS: Just out of curiosity, when you joined forces with the Brooklyn Museum were most of the in place curators male or did you inherit a lot of strong women curators?

ES: There were men and women curators. Amy G. Poster, for example, was the head of Asian Art at the time a very strong curator. I don’t know what the exact gender balance of curators was. 

When Arnold invited me to join the board in 2000 there were about twenty five men and about four or five women on the board at that time.  Now we’re thirty eight and the majority are women, two thirds are women. The museums entire senior administration is women with the exception of David Berliner who just came on as COO.  The board officers are now all women. When I came on the board officers were all men. 

VS: I noticed currently at the Brooklyn Museum, perhaps for the first time in the history of any museum, the three main shows, all major current exhibitions, are all women artists. It’s so powerful.

ES: Yes, It’s a great moment. It’s a really incredible moment. We’ve always had two women shows going on in the Sackler Center but with ‘Marilyn Minter: Pretty Dirty’ and ‘Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern’ accompanying our ’We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85’ it’s a full sweep throughout the museum. We’ve taken over the whole museum. That was the idea, to take over the museum.  So far so good. 

VS: While you were making all this happen has there ever been a moment when your jaw dropped because you were actually watching feminist progress being made right in the room where you were sitting?

ES: I think what dropped the jaw for me was how rapidly the Sackler Center had external influence. It was within months of opening. I hadn’t expected that we would have such an impact internationally, for galleries, for women artists, for feminist artists all of a sudden.  There’s still not parity, as we know, but the improvement has been significant. Of course I watched as immediately the Whitney started looking and the Guggenheim started looking and the Met started looking. You can see that it’s changed. It’s changed, but we still have more to go. It wasn’t so much jaw dropping but it surprised me how quickly it happened. I thought it might take a year or two. I didn’t think it would take a month or two. Well it just goes to show you how hungry everybody is for women’s work. It really has less to do with the fact that maybe I had an impact by coming up with something.  More it shows that there is an audience who is really hungry for this work. It taps into that. People really want it.  

VS: We know how important it is for global solution seeking to get women’s voices into every arena right now.

ES: Well that’s true we have a long way to go. 

VS: You work on that every week, every month every time you do a program. 

ES: That was very important to me. That is why we created the Forum in the space too.  We have The Dinner Party Gallery, the Herstory Gallery, The Feminist Gallery and the Forum. I wanted a space that would seat about forty or fifty people. The Brooklyn Museum auditorium seats four hundred. I knew that we would have a lot of programming, that was going to be very important, and if you have a hundred people in an auditorium that seats four hundred it looks like nobody is there.  So we have our Forum. The museum at the time didn’t understand the importance of programming to the Sackler Center. The Sackler Center programming to me was always integral. Because the museum didn’t understand the import it actually gave me leeway the first year I was out there every Saturday and Sunday doing programming and inviting people to speak. I was basically curating the programming and all of a sudden the museum looked up and realized, wow, Gloria Steinem was in the auditorium and it was sold out, and talking about sex trafficking, and we’ve got something going here. The programming now is integral to the museum. Rebekah Tafel and I continue to do the social action portion. Our ‘States of Denial: the Illegal Incarceration of Women, Children and People of Color ‘ started almost four years ago, before mass incarceration and state sanctioned violence was headline news.  

VS: I see a great photo on your desk of you picketing…it looks like you have always been an activist.

ES: Oh my gosh, that’s when I was 15. We were picketing the FBI building for voting rights in Selma Alabama. I grew up as an activist. I went to The New Lincoln School up in Harlem on 110th street my whole life. It was all about civil rights and social action. My parents were about equity and equality, moral and ethical action. I was brought up to do this. And because my father and my family had so much to do with museums I was able to watch my father negotiate and deal with museums so that I was prepared to negotiate with the Brooklyn Museum. I watched my father do it for decades.

VS: While watching him your brain must have been firing on how to bring the two together. Bringing social action to museums.

ES: I knew how to do it. I watched him do it. It’s like anything else, you have to be trained to do something so that it really works and I was well trained. I’m not a philanthropist. I consider myself a human rights activist with means.

VS: So you are a ‘firsty’ yourself.

ES: Yes, I guess I am.  Definitely. 

VS: How do you respond when women question if feminism is outdated?

ES: Nobody has ever said to me that feminism is outdated. The world that I live in is a world of feminists and feminist artists. But it was very interesting, on January 12, 2017, there was a panel discussion at the Museum of Modern Art just before Trumps inauguration. Catherine Morris, our wonderful curator whom I adore and I love working with her and we’re very close, was speaking. She had said before the election she had started to wonder whether or not we needed a center for feminist art. Then she said ‘but clearly we do.’ And everybody burst out laughing. I raised my hand after a little bit and I said that’s why I created the Sackler Center to exist ‘until we live in a world of equity and equality and justice’.  I never doubted the need for it.

I think there were generations of women and young women who felt that we had reached post feminism. Catherine, even was wondering about it.  And that sort of surprised me, but that’s cool, that’s fine. What I have adored about Catherine is what she has brought to the Sackler Center. When she came she asked ‘What do you want me to do?’ ‘what’s my mission?’. And I said, ‘We’re ahead of the curve, we’re writing the canon, we are breaking new ground and I want you to make sure that we stay ahead of it.’ MOMA and the Whitney and the Met and the Guggenheim all have money and we did not. But we have something they do not have and that is a commitment to community, a commitment to diversity, a commitment to taking risks. They have different commitments. Catherine keeps us ahead of the curve. How she has, and with the grace and intelligence that she has, is by opening the dialogue to not just feminist art as a category but what is the content of feminist art, what is feminism and what is feminist in art that we don’t see because we’ve been trained to see through patriarchal eyes. Even going back to classical times, in Egypt and in Greece, there is the power of women and we don’t see that. We’re not taught that in art history. It doesn’t take that point of view. So Catherine has really broadened the conversation about feminist content, and what it means to have feminist content. Our current exhibition, ‘ We Wanted a Revolution; Black Radical Women 1965-85’, is absolutely outstanding. We have completely busted open art history with this exhibition. To have black women artists, who in the 60’s and 70’s were already moving along in new directions, breaking ground, who often not even to this day, were not included in art history. It’s like Hanson not having any women in their art history until the 1980’s. Black women artists have been continuing to suffer from the same lack of inclusion and in fact omission and erasure. So what we are doing is exciting.  

VS: These certainly are interesting times. With the social and political upheaval people are really starting to open their eyes. It has increased empathy and people want to reach out. But at the same time there are all these other walls being built perhaps between half of the women in America. How do we include them, bring them into the conversation?

ES: I haven’t the foggiest idea. This goes back to the Reagan era. Civics was not taught after the Reagan era in public school education. As a result we have a citizenry, no matter what color, no matter what economic background who went to school and did not ever learn how the government works, what the different parts of government are, how checks and balances work and what our civic responsibility is. As Obama said in his closing statement the Constitution is just a piece of paper. What brings it to life is the population, is involvement of people. What happened was a. we aren’t learning that it was a requirement and b. didn’t understand how our government functions as a democracy. That it all is grassroots. That it all starts with the congressman or with your school board person. That it all gets built from the ground up not from the top down. This has been a huge wake up call. I was reading on Twitter what somebody wrote if Trump has done anything he’s woken up the entire population. This may be his only contribution of his presidency, but it’s big. It’s great to see people opening their eyes and becoming active.

When I opened the Sackler Center to the women who were having trouble with the word feminism, I would say, if you believe you have parity now, you are not only going to hit a glass ceiling, you’re going to hit a cement ceiling and you’re going to end up with a migraine.

VS: And you might be sitting in a place where you are quite fortunate compared to others. If you can’t see the disparity for populations of women other than yourself then you somehow have blinders on.  

ES: Yes, It’s been very interesting. I think the question of ‘intersectionality’, which is a term women of color are using, and ‘privilege’ which is popping up, is really beginning a new conversation. 

It’s been very interesting to me. I graduated from high school in ‘66.  I grew up in Harlem in a highly integrated school, the most integrated school in the city. There was no sexism. There was no racism. I encountered none of that till I went off to college. It was very very surprising.  At that time I was sleeping in front of the White House for voting rights in Selma Alabama.  It’s what we did. It’s what you did. When I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s, ‘Between the World and Me’ it woke me up in a new way. His writing is so incredible I think for the first time I had an inkling of what it was to be walking in those shoes.  More and more, I don’t know if it has to do with age. I’m not quite sure what it has to do with. My parents were young adults of the Depression. I’m a first generation American. My grandparents owned a grocery store in Brooklyn. My father was a genius and my mother never let us forget that whatever he earned was his, and how fortunate we were to experience the things that we experienced, traveling, art and so forth.  

My father used to say to do x, y or z was a privilege. I would hear him say it in a speech for example when the Sackler Wing opened at the Metropolitan Museum. People now use the word honor, ‘it’s an honor to introduce so and so’ or ‘it’s an honor to be here today’. My father would talk about privilege, not as having privilege or being privileged. He didn’t use the word that way.  But rather that it is a privilege to be able to…  And it was very clear that we had to recognize that. I would say it has been a privilege for me to open a Sackler Center. It was a blessing for me to start the Repatriation Foundation. We’re coming up at a time of so much just discourse. I understand a lot about it because of the way I grew up.  

I walked into ‘We Wanted a Revolution’ in the Sackler Center and I just had to stop and take it in because for me having that exhibition at the Sackler Center is what the Sackler Center is all about. It is totally what it is all about. It is bringing the voices and bringing the people and bringing the art to the people that have heretofore been ignored.

VS: I hear in your voice, that although you have spent your whole life as an activist, this moment is bringing up an enormous amount. What we’re experiencing as a country is urging women to excavate their pasts and try to make sense of where we are. 

ES: Well I’m horrified with this country. I feel like we’re looking at a Nazi regime. I recognize things. I see a dismantling of our democracy. It is a horrifying time and yet so many are sustaining the protests, sustaining the resistance and learning what it is that they have to do to hang on to their rights as Americans. 

I was actually at Gracie Mansion at the opening of ‘New York 1942’ and was speaking after the First Lady. I talked about ICE and I said I recognize that we are a sanctuary city and that the NYPD will not assist ICE with deportations of immigrants. But I said to the assembled crowd, ‘NYPD will not assist ICE but they will also not deter them. And if the NYPD will not deter them, then we have to’. We have to put our bodies in between ICE and those people who are being rounded up. 

VS: How do you address these issues at the Sackler Center? 

ES: I started ‘States of Denial; The Illegal Incarceration of Women, Children and People of Color’ in March 2014 and somebody had asked me why I was doing it at a museum.  

Then a couple weeks later on March 20, 2014 Holland Cotter’s article; ‘Door to Art of the World, Barely Ajar’ in The Times’ Museums section talks about inequity and injustice in the museum world. He writes,’ Even unbuilt, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi feels like a white elephant, corralled on the Island of Happiness with others of its kind: an Abu Dhabi branch of the Louvre designed by Jean Nouvel, and a performing arts center designed by Zaha Hadid, all constructed by people who will most likely never get in the doors and whose art is still hard to find in comparable museums in New York. Yet it would take a real cynic not to speculate about how this might be different. What if seemingly incompatible institutional features — humane local wisdom and custodianship of treasures of art — could be made to coexist? We’d have museums that are on the right side of history, and in which the future of art would be secure. That ideal is worth storming an empire for.’

And that is exactly what the Sackler Center does. It works with the community, it takes our art and our art history and it puts the two together so that we can see the past, so that we can see the future. And so I was thrilled with this article because then next time the question came up I was able to answer the question adding not only because I think it’s relevant but so does Holland Cotter. And as Arnold Lehman did so does our new director, Ann Pasternak. We are working on ideas about how to do that.  For me ‘We Wanted a Revolution’ is an ideal example.

VS: I know that it’s very difficult to be everywhere and see what’s going on right now. But I can’t help but think that knowing what I’m going through, and what you are speaking of, and when so many women are soul searching and looking at everything that they’ve experienced in their lives that brought us here, and so many feminist artists are digging down deeper maybe than they ever have before, there’s got to be amazing work being made right now. Are you sensing or hearing about feminist artists doing new bodies of work? 

ES: I don’t function in that world that way. I don’t go to art fairs. I don’t go on many studio visits. I know a lot of very well-known women artists. They are also of my generation, many of them are older.  

VS: Do they call you and say, Elizabeth you have to see what I’m doing I’m so upset or I’m so moved or I’m so engaged in this.

ES: People don’t call me to come and see. I’m not a collector. My father was a great collector. My father was a real collector.  It’s true I have a great collection of Judy Chicago works that I put together as a curated collection but I don’t consider myself a collector. So I don’t get those kinds of phone calls. I find that artists are like writers. You get pregnant with an idea and it needs to gestate. I’m writing in my head long before I ever sit down to a pen or computer. It needs to form. It needs to take shape. So I don’t find that women artists talk about how what they are working on right now is a result of the other. At least not the photographers and artists I know. 

VS: I suppose I’m still a bit of an optimist. I think women artists across the country, with all they’re going through right now, must be making great art. Maybe it won’t surface right away. Hopefully it won’t take twenty years to shake it out. 

ES: You will see it and I probably will not, just by virtue of our chronological ages. 

VS: Do you have any other projects that you’re pursuing from an activist standpoint that you want to highlight? I loved the fact that you went into prisons to engage incarcerated women in artmaking and then brought the work into the museum.

ES: Yes, ‘Women of York: Shared Dining’ was incredible. Mass incarceration is an enormous human rights violation. Obama was starting to roll it back and whether or not that’s going to happen I don’t know with privatized prisons and the new administration.  

VS: I learned a lot by watching the Sackler Center panel discussion. The stories about the young girls in foster care getting incarcerated for not making their beds. This is information that needs to be heard.

ES: We have a huge huge human rights problem in this country. We always have. Whether it’s been against the First Peoples, Native Americans, whether it’s been against African-Americans. The good news is it’s all bubbling up to the top. The great news is that people are seeing it. People who either weren’t paying attention, didn’t see it, didn’t know, were too busy doing whatever, buying shoes, are now seeing it.  And that’s a great thing and it’s the only way we are going to make progress. Progress right now is going to have to be rolling back a whole bunch of things in order to move forward.  

Last night I was listening to the first half hour of Obama at the University of Chicago. He was there talking to students. The fact of the matter is that for twenty minutes he spoke clearly, eloquently and with a point. I thought, my God, have we actually forgotten what it is to have a President who is speaking in full sentences, in full paragraphs, with a clear point, actually speaking English that you can understand?  

VS: And with some deep thinking behind it. Some heart and soul behind it. 

ES: Just sentences, forget the heart and soul, we’re talking about being able to put together sentences and have information and a vision. But in any event I don’t want to end there.

I think there’s a lot of work to be done and I think it’s great that there are new generations of people doing it.

VS: Thank you for being a ringleader and an instigator, for making sparks fly and things happen. 

ES: It’s been a pleasure and it’s been a privilege. 

Photo credit: Jurgen Frank

Opening Dinner for We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 at the Brooklyn Museum (April 20, 2017). Photo credit: Elena Olivo

Arnold Lehman and Elizabeth Sackler at the 2015 American Federation of Arts Gala

Elizabeth Sackler and Judy Chicago at the opening of Judy Chicago: A Survey at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C., 2002)

Photo Credit © 2012 Philip Greenberg.

IN THIS IMAGE
Elizabeth A. Sackler and Yoko Ono
November 15 2012
Brooklyn Museum Yoko Ono
Tenth Annual Women in the Arts Benefit Luncheon

Introduction by Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman followed by a conversation between Ono and Catherine Morris, Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

Multi-media Conceptual artist Yoko Ono was be honored at the tenth annual Women in the Arts luncheon Thursday, November 15, 2012. Proceeds from the event benefited the many educational and artistic programs offered by the Brooklyn Museum and its Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

The program began at 11 a.m. with an introduction by Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman followed by a conversation between Ono and Catherine Morris, Curator of the Sackler Center. The program concludes with the presentation of the 2012 Women in the Arts Award to Ono and a reception and luncheon in the Museum's Beaux-Arts Court.

Interviewer Victoria Selbach is a feminist painter focusing on women. Selbach's recent work, Generational Tapestries, excavates feminine identity as it is passed from our foremothers to our daughters. 

GO WILD! Curated by Conor Walton

There’s no blank spots on the map anymore, anywhere on earth. If you want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind. ― Jon Krakauer

Inside all of us is… A Wild Thing. ― Maurice Sendak

Straight after I agreed to curate this exhibition, I sat down to dinner with my children and asked if they could think of a good title for a show. The first thing my thirteen-year-old son Daniel suggested was 'GO WILD!' and I thought “Wow! That's it!” As a title and a theme, ‘GO WILD!’ provides a context tight enough to offer coherence, yet loose enough to give the artists freedom to do what they do best. You can interpret it as targeting Nature in its broadest sense, or simply as an exhortation to take a risk; to unleash one's talent, express the Dionysian aspect of our natures. Both of these themes (and many more) came through in the work I have been offered, so I am delighted: overall, I think a bit of the zeitgeist comes through in this show.

Rachel Linnemeier | Camera Click | oil on aluminum | 16x20 | 2018

In many of these paintings our relationship with Nature is obviously an underlying issue, but one which presents itself in many forms. In Rachel Linnemeier’s Camera Click it takes the form of ironical detachment. The subject of the painting stands heroically, camera in hand, apparently seeking Nature and ready to ‘capture the scene’, and yet the Nature he seeks already appears reduced, processed, flattened. The painting seems to comment upon the way so much of our experience of the world is now packaged and mechanically mediated. There is humour in this painting, but also melancholy; a sense of lost directness and authenticity in our relationships, both with that which is ‘other’ and with our inner selves.

Dana Hawk | Wildlife | oil on panel | 6 x 6 | 2018

Childhood is a recurring theme, which for many of us appears to stand for a time when we were closer to Nature, more spontaneous and whole, and wilder. Dana Hawk Heimbach’s Wildlife “is about being a kid immersed and one with nature.” Serena Potter’s Night-timers are adults escaping into an infantile world of spontaneous fun and irresponsibility. For Linda Tracey Brandon in Capture the Flag, childhood represents “that brief juncture where fantasy and innocence intersect with the wild, reckless freedom of living in the present moment.” These words are also appropriate for the child in Cynthia Sitton’s She Delighted in Them: living in her fantasy, unaware of the approaching storm behind her, it is, according to Sitton, “a love letter to my ill daughter”, and infused with a wistful sense of adult suffering and regret.

Painting by Denise Fulton

Some of the artists have used the nude as a way of articulating our animal natures. Susannah Martin's provocative image Schmetterling (‘Butterfly’) is the quintessence of Dionysiac rapture. In Tina Garret’s Baptism, a female bather evokes the pleasure of skinny-dipping; momentarily shedding inhibitions and finding peace through immersion in watery nature. In Denise Fulton’s Camouflage, the woman hides in plain sight, her form broken up by dramatic shadows. She eyes the viewer like a wild animal (though it’s not clear whether she is metaphorically prey, or predator waiting in ambush). Sarah Lacey’s exquisite drawing Cygnus finds analogies in human and animal form, in this case between human and swan. As she says:

Organic form - the way nature grows and shapes itself - is deeply playful and fractal, and shapes repeat, mirror and metamorphize across forms and species. My model’s bone structure, particularly in the shape of her collarbones, reminded me of the curve of a swan’s outstretched wings. I wanted to bring those shapes to life as a physical manifestation: her daemon, her familiar, an extension of her spirit and power. She is the swan and the swan is her. We are not separate from Nature, we are Nature.

Adam Miller | Diana and Accteon | oil and tempera on panel | 36x50 | 2018

In exploring the contested borderlands between human and animal, ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’, several of the artists in this show have rediscovered the power of mythology. Adam Miller's reworking of ancient mythological themes of violence and transgression, suffering and rapture, seem intent on reconnecting us with our deepest natures. For the hunter Actaeon (whose punishment for seeing the Goddess naked is to be turned into a stag and torn apart by his hounds) insight comes at a terrible price. 

An inevitable consequence of reinvigorating of the mythopoeic imagination appears to be the rediscovery of Tragedy, all too apt for the coming age. Indeed, my wager on our dawning epoch is that (contra the superficial optimism of our ‘official’ culture) only a sublimely tragic art will do it justice. In these works, I see its first awakening.

Luke Hillestad | Medusa | oil on canvas

Like Miller, Luke Hillestad brings continuity of human and natural form in a mythological direction. His Medusa, half-animal, appears not as an object of terror but of pathos and desire: in its way it too speaks of our situation in which wild Nature appears less fearsome and monstrous than beautiful and suffering. This Medusa stands like an endangered species; the carrier of an intuitive, poetic wisdom entirely at odds with the technocratic logic of our civilisation. 

Molly Judd | Raskolnikov | 140x150 cm | 2019

Molly Judd is a young Irish artist snapping at her elders' heels with whom I seem to have an unwitting relationship of common themes. When I first saw her Raskolnikov I was so happy she hadn't called it Flogging a Dead Horse, because I am working on a painting of this title, and close enough in theme to hers (which I take to be ecocidal guilt, shame at our criminal treatment of Nature) in Molly's case raised to the level of sublime metaphor.

Martin Wittfooth | As above so below | 30 inches | 2019

I’ve long been fascinated by Martin Wittfooth's depiction of a post-apocalyptic, post-human world in which a degraded, mutant nature recovers amongst the ruins of our civilisation. Wittfooth’s imagery is striking for its anti-humanism: ostensibly the human image is banished from his art and animal nature reigns supreme. Yet the physical or metaphorical detritus of our culture is everywhere in his world and the satirical force of his work is clearly premised on our species’ collective insanity: Wittfooth’s imagination is wounded, angry and feral.

Both directly and indirectly, many of these paintings bear witness to the planetary catastrophe unfolding around us, and the need to recover a sense of human identity in which Culture isn't opposed to Nature but unfolds within it. This is, I think, what gives some of the best contemporary figurative art - naturalistic in technique but using dream, fantasy, metaphor to plumb our psychic depths - its current impetus and urgency.

All these artists combine old-master virtuoso techniques with a contemporary sensibility to produce paintings that, in sum, tackle almost every subject, from the painfully or joyfully private to the great public issues of our day: politics, ecology, the fate of our civilization and our planet. If an artist's job is to give us images through which we can better understand ourselves and the world, this is exactly what these artists are doing. I think there's a huge appetite today, particularly among the young (and in the context of an often shallow, consumerist pop culture) for an art that isn't simply brash or slick or clever, but that speaks to our deepest desires and needs: for truth and beauty, and above all, for meaning.

There are many treasures to be found in this little collection of works, for those with eyes to find them! Expect to be provoked, teased, caressed with beauty, troubled with insight. You deserve nothing less.