Jane Kaufman | |
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| Born | May 26, 1938 New York, New York |
| Died | June 2, 2021 (aged 83) Andes, New York |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Artist |
Jane Kaufman was an American artist who was affiliated with the Pattern and Decoration movement. She was also a member of the art group Guerrilla Girls.
Jane Kaufman was born in New York City to Herbert Kaufman, an advertising executive, and Roslyn Kaufman. She got her B.S. in art education from New York University (1960) and her M.F.A. from Hunter College (1965). [1] [2]
In 1972, Kaufman got a job teaching at Bard College, making her one of their first women professors. [1] [2] Later in her career (1983–91) she was an adjunct instructor at Cooper Union.
During the last years of her life, she lived in the Catskills. [2]
Kaufman began her career in the early 1970s as a minimalist painter of large canvases. [1] [2] She had a solo show at the Whitney museum in 1971 [2] and took part in the 1973 Whitney Biennial, drawing praise from critic Hilton Kramer. [3] She went on to work with decorative motifs in her work as well as decorative materials such as embroidery and other forms of sewing, feathers, and beads. [1] As part of this process, she shifted to making screens, wall hangings, and quilts. Her pattern vocabulary drew inspiration from American quilting traditions as well as from Persian and Japanese textiles and North African mosaics. [1] [4]
Unlike some artists in what became known as the Pattern and Decoration movement, Kaufman's pioneering work in this genre often had a feminist edginess. [1] In 2010 she created an embroidery that galleries did not choose to exhibit - its central message was "Abstinence makes the church grow fondlers". [1] She was a member of the Second Wave feminist art group Guerrilla Girls and was one of the few members of that group to use her own name rather than remain anonymous. [1] [2]
In 1978, Kaufman curated the first Pattern and Decoration group exhibition at Alessandra Gallery in New York. [1] Although the work fell out of prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, the Hudson River Museum held a retrospective in 2008, and another retrospective was mounted by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2019. [1] [4]
Kaufman was awarded both the prestigious Guggenheim fellowship (1974) and grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (1989).
Among Kaufman's public commissions is the sculpture Crystal Hanging in the Tip O’Neill Federal Building in Boston.
Kaufman's work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, [5] the Whitney Museum, [6] and the Smithsonian Institution, [7] among others.
Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson. [8]
Kaufman married the painter Doug Ohlson in 1966. They divorced in the 1970s.
A quilt is a multi-layered textile, traditionally composed of two or more layers of fabric or fiber. Commonly three layers are used with a filler material. These layers traditionally include a woven cloth top, a layer of batting or wadding, and a woven back combined using the techniques of quilting. This is the process of sewing on the face of the fabric, and not just the edges, to combine the three layers together to reinforce the material. Stitching patterns can be a decorative element. A single piece of fabric can be used for the top of a quilt, but in many cases the top is created from smaller fabric pieces joined, or patchwork. The pattern and color of these pieces creates the design.
Judy Chicago is an American feminist artist, art educator, and writer known for her large collaborative art installation pieces about birth and creation images, which examine the role of women in history and culture. During the 1970s, Chicago founded the first feminist art program in the United States at California State University, Fresno which acted as a catalyst for feminist art and art education during the 1970s. Her inclusion in hundreds of publications in various areas of the world showcases her influence in the worldwide art community. Additionally, many of her books have been published in other countries, making her work more accessible to international readers. Chicago's work incorporates a variety of artistic skills, such as needlework, counterbalanced with skills such as welding and pyrotechnics. Chicago's most well known work is The Dinner Party, which is permanently installed in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The Dinner Party celebrates the accomplishments of women throughout history and is widely regarded as the first epic feminist artwork. Other notable art projects by Chicago include International Honor Quilt, Birth Project, Powerplay, and The Holocaust Project. She is represented by Jessica Silverman gallery.
Ana Mendieta was a Cuban-American performance artist, sculptor, painter, and video artist who is best known for her "earth-body" artwork. She is considered one of the most influential Cuban-American artists of the post-World War II era. Born in Havana, Mendieta left for the United States in 1961.
Fiber art refers to fine art whose material consists of natural or synthetic fiber and other components, such as fabric or yarn. It focuses on the materials and on the manual labor on the part of the artist as part of the works' significance, and prioritizes aesthetic value over utility.
The Dinner Party is an installation artwork by feminist artist Judy Chicago. Widely regarded as the first epic feminist artwork, it functions as a symbolic history of women in civilization. There are 39 elaborate place settings on a triangular table for 39 mythical and historical famous women. Sacajawea, Sojourner Truth, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Empress Theodora of Byzantium, Virginia Woolf, Susan B. Anthony, and Georgia O'Keeffe are among the symbolic guests.
Faith Ringgold is an American painter, painting on different materials including fabric, a published author, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, and intersectional activist, perhaps best known for her narrative quilts.
Nancy Graves was an American sculptor, painter, printmaker, and sometime-filmmaker known for her focus on natural phenomena like camels or maps of the Moon. Her works are included in many public collections, including those of the National Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), the Des Moines Art Center, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and the Museum of Fine Arts. When Graves was just 29, she was given a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. At the time she was the youngest artist, and fifth woman to achieve this honor.
The feminist art movement in the United States began in the early 1970s and sought to promote the study, creation, understanding and promotion of women's art. First-generation feminist artists include Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Suzanne Lacy, Judith Bernstein, Sheila de Bretteville, Mary Beth Edelson, Carolee Schneeman, Rachel Rosenthal, and many other women. They were part of the Feminist art movement in the United States in the early 1970s to develop feminist writing and art. The movement spread quickly through museum protests in both New York and Los Angeles, via an early network called W.E.B. that disseminated news of feminist art activities from 1971 to 1973 in a nationally circulated newsletter, and at conferences such as the West Coast Women's Artists Conference held at California Institute of the Arts and the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts, at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C..
Quilt art, sometimes known as art quilting, mixed media art quilts or fiber art quilts, is an art form that uses both modern and traditional quilting techniques to create art objects. Practitioners of quilt art create it based on their experiences, imagery, and ideas, rather than traditional patterns. Quilt art generally has more in common with the fine arts than it does with traditional quilting. Quilt art is typically hung or mounted.
The quilts of Gee's Bend are quilts created by a group of women and their ancestors who live or have lived in the isolated African-American hamlet of Gee's Bend, Alabama along the Alabama River. The quilts of Gee's Bend are among the most important African-American visual and cultural contributions to the history of art within the United States. Arlonzia Pettway, Annie Mae Young and Mary Lee Bendolph are among some of the most notable quilters from Gee's Bend. Many of the residents in the community can trace their ancestry back to enslaved people from the Pettway Plantation. Arlonzia Pettway can recall her grandmother's stories of her ancestors, specifically of Dinah Miller, who was brought to the United States by slave ship in 1859.
Miriam Schapiro was a Canadian-born artist based in the United States. She was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and a pioneer of feminist art. She was also considered a leader of the Pattern and Decoration art movement. Schapiro's artwork blurs the line between fine art and craft. She incorporated craft elements into her paintings due to their association with women and femininity. Schapiro's work touches on the issue of feminism and art: especially in the aspect of feminism in relation to abstract art. Schapiro honed in her domesticated craft work and was able to create work that stood amongst the rest of the high art. These works represent Schapiro's identity as an artist working in the center of contemporary abstraction and simultaneously as a feminist being challenged to represent women's "consciousness" through imagery. She often used icons that are associated with women, such as hearts, floral decorations, geometric patterns, and the color pink. In the 1970s she made the hand fan, a typically small woman's object, heroic by painting it six feet by twelve feet. "The fan-shaped canvas, a powerful icon, gave Schapiro the opportunity to experiment … Out of this emerged a surface of textured coloristic complexity and opulence that formed the basis of her new personal style. The kimono, fans, houses, and hearts were the form into which she repeatedly poured her feelings and desires, her anxieties, and hopes".
Pattern and Decoration was a United States art movement from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. The movement has sometimes been referred to as "P&D" or as The New Decorativeness. The movement was championed by the gallery owner Holly Solomon. The movement was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Hudson River Museum in 2008.
Joyce Kozloff is an American artist whose politically engaged work has been based on cartography since the early 1990s.
Katherine Westphal was an American textile designer and fiber artist who helped to establish quilting as a fine art form.
Dindga McCannon, born on July 31, 1947, is an African-American artist, fiber artist, muralist, teacher author and illustrator. She co-founded the collective Where We At, Black Women Artists in 1971.
Cynthia Carlson is an American visual artist, living and working in New York.
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Patsy Ann Norvell (1942–2013) was an American visual artist who worked in sculpture, installation art and public art. She was a pioneering feminist artist active in the Women's movement since 1969. In 1972 she was a founder of A.I.R. Gallery which was the first cooperative gallery in the U.S. that showed solely women's work. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in the U.S. and abroad. She received numerous grants, awards and residencies for her achievements, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She created permanent public art works for the New York City subway system, designed and created lobby and plaza installations in Los Angeles, CA, New Brunswick, NJ, Bridgeport, CT, and Bethesda, MD. Her work has received historical and critical acclaim, and has been written about in books, journals and newspapers including, Art in the Land: A Critical Anthology of Environmental Art, in Sculpture (magazine), the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and numerous other publications.
Marjorie Kramer is a figurative painter of al fresco landscapes and feminist self-portraits.
Mary Grigoriadis is an American artist known for her paintings in the pattern and decoration movement.
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