Jane Kaufman | |
---|---|
Born | New York, New York | May 26, 1938
Died | June 2, 2021 83) Andes, New York | (aged
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.
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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.
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