Judy Pfaff

Last updated
Judy Pfaff
Born1946
London
Education Cass Technical High School
Alma mater Washington University in St. Louis, Yale University
Style Installation art
Awards MacArthur Fellow

Judy Pfaff (born 1946) is an American artist known mainly for installation art and sculptures, though she also produces paintings and prints. [1] Pfaff has received numerous awards for her work, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004 and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation [2] (1983) and the National Endowment for the Arts. [3] [4] Major exhibitions of her work have been held at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, [5] the Denver Art Museum and Saint Louis Art Museum. [6] In 2013 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [7] Video interviews can be found on Art 21, Miles McEnery Gallery, MoMa, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and other sources.

Contents

Early life and education

Yoyogi (State II), 1984, is a woodcut print published by Crown Point Press in San Francisco. Pfaff went to Japan to learn the technique. Judy Pfaff woodcut.jpg
Yoyogi (State II), 1984, is a woodcut print published by Crown Point Press in San Francisco. Pfaff went to Japan to learn the technique.

Pfaff was born in London in 1946. [9] Her father, a Royal Air Force pilot, was absent from her life. Pfaff's mother moved to Detroit soon after Pfaff's birth, leaving Pfaff and her brother to be raised by their grandparents. Post-war London was bleak; Pfaff has described playing in bombed out and abandoned buildings, gathering "raw materials for fantasy buildings." [10] A reunion in 1956 with her mother in Detroit, [11] where she attended Cass Technical High School, did not end well. At age 15, Pfaff left home and eventually married a U.S. Air Force officer. She attended Wayne State University and Southern Illinois University, completing a BFA at Washington University in 1971. [12]

Pfaff enrolled in the MFA program at Yale University School of Art, where she embraced the use of heavy equipment and outsized materials. Other disciplines, such as physics, medicine, zoology and astronomy, also influenced her work. [10] At Yale, Pfaff studied with Al Held, who became her mentor. With Held's encouragement, she created an installation for her final project. [5] She completed her MFA in 1973 and then moved to New York City.

Teaching

Pfaff taught at the California Institute of the Arts from 1976 to 1979. [13] She joined the faculty at Bard College in New York in 1994, [14] where she is currently the co-director of the Studio Arts program. [15]

Style

Since the 70s, Pfaff has helped redefine contemporary notions of sculpture [16] and has been recognized for her innovative approach to space. [17] While others at the time subscribed to minimalist art forms, Pfaff began making colorful, visually active environments that encompassed an entire gallery [17] and complicated the relationship between sculpture and the architecture that contained it. [16]

Spanning across mediums such as painting, printmaking, sculpture and installation, it can be described as "painting in space". [18] Pfaff draws upon spiritual, botanical, and art historical imagery, [18] and "explores issues of creativity and the complexity of life by using strings, vines, spheres, and other objects arranged in a seemingly haphazard way". [19] Although, Pfaff has so far refused to give narrative meaning to her work, which shows an "urgent and ferocious need to labor for the visual and tactile […] in an era where language dominates artistic activity". [18]

Pfaff incorporates a range of everyday and industrial materials into her installations such as wire, plastic tubing, fabric, [17] steel, fiberglass, and plaster as well as salvaged signage and tree roots. [20] Her interest in natural motifs extends to a series of prints integrating vegetation, maps, and medical illustrations. [20] She has also used her dramatic sculptural abilities to make set designs for several theatrical stage productions. [20] In recent years, she has incorporated photographic and digital imagery into her installations and prints. [16]

Process

Pfaff enters an exhibition space not knowing exactly what will happen. [17] Rice Gallery describes her working process is intuitive and highly physical; [17] she relies on her knowledge, skill, and experience to carry her through. [17] Her art is site-specific; [17] each one of her installations considers the specific spatial geometries of the room so no two shows are ever alike. [21] Pfaff and her crew may labor for months or years on shows that last day or weeks; the work is deconstructed and sections are discarded after a show comes down. [21]

Pfaff's studio in upstate New York is filled with winches, welding equipment, a forklift, and pressure washers. [17] When she and her assistants arrive to set up an installation, they bring with them a truck full of tools, welders, pre-cut installation components, as well as raw material, and begin to experiment. [17] Pfaff is used to working in large spaces; her permanent installation at the Philadelphia Convention Center, cirque, CIRQUE, is reputed to be the largest suspended sculpture in the world. [17]

Installation art

In New York, Pfaff created her first large-scale installation piece, J.A.S.O.N--J.A.S.O.N., at the nonprofit Artists Space in 1975. [22]

Pfaff describes her site-specific installations as abstract narratives based on personal experiences. [23] Art critic Benjamin Genocchio commented that Pfaff's installation work can seem disordered, but with a closer look an order seems to reveal itself. [14]

In 2006, Pfaff's Buckets of Rain was exhibited at the Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art gallery in New York. [24]

Pfaff's installation work has influenced other artists, including Jessica Stockholder and Sarah Sze. [25]

Other media

In addition to her installations, Pfaff creates paintings, sculpture, and prints. "I've always done prints and drawings," Pfaff says. "If you get an installation of mine, you inherit [my assistant] Ryan, myself, a crew, the dog, the noise, the dirt. We wreck the house. So if you don't want that, then you get prints and drawings." [26]

Pfaff has also done scenic design. [14] In 2010 Ameringer/McEnery/Yoke showed a retrospective from her oeuvre ranging from the late 1970s to recent work. In a review in The Brooklyn Rail , Kara L. Rooney wrote of the survey's cohesion, "somehow, Pfaff's eclectic interpretation of '80s flamboyance, '90s insecurity, and the aughts' incessant optimism succeeds." [27]

Solo exhibitions and installations

During her prolific career, Pfaff has mounted over 100 solo exhibitions and installations in galleries and museums worldwide. [17] She has had major exhibitions at Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison (2002); Denver Art Museum (1994); St. Louis Art Museum (1989); and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (1982). [20] Her work is also included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Gallery, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Detroit Institute of Arts, among others. [28] [29] [30] [31] Furthermore, she represented the United States in the 1998 Bienal de Sao Paolo. [20]

Pfaff's work is not restricted to Installation Art pieces. Her other notable works include Botanica, a mixed media on paper piece owned by the Orlando Museum of Art and Imperial Hotel, a relief print using the intaglio technique owned by the Tampa Museum of Art. [19]

Grants and awards

Pfaff has received several notable awards and grants including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center (2014), [32] the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award (2004), [32] a Bessie (1984), [32] and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1983) [32] and the National Endowment for the Arts (1986). [32] She was also elected to become a member of the American Academy of Arts in 2009. [32]

Recent life

Pfaff is the Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts and co-director of the studio arts program at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. [17] [19] She continues to produce work for sale and for exhibition, including installations and prints. She currently lives and works in Tivoli, NY. [19] [16]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diana Cooper (artist)</span> American visual artist (born 1964)

Diana Cooper is an American visual artist, known for largely abstract, improvised hybrid constructions that combine drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and photography. Her art has evolved from canvas works centered on proliferating doodles to sprawling installations of multiplying elements and architectonic structures. Critics have described her earlier work—primarily made with craft supplies such as markers, pens, foamcore, pushpins, felt, pipe cleaners, tape and pompoms—as humble-looking yet labor-intensive, provisional and precarious, and "a high-wire act attempting to balance order and pandemonium." They note parallels to earlier abstract women artists such as Eva Hesse, Lee Bontecou, Elizabeth Murray, and Yayoi Kusama. Lilly Wei, however, identifies an "absurdist playfulness and Orwellian intimations" in Cooper's work that occupy a unique place in contemporary abstraction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hannah Wilke</span> American artist

Hannah Wilke was an American painter, sculptor, photographer, video artist and performance artist. Wilke's work is known for exploring issues of feminism, sexuality and femininity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Lucier</span> American artist

Mary Lucier is an American visual artist and pioneer in video art. Concentrating primarily on video and installation since 1973, she has produced numerous multiple- and single-channel pieces that have had a significant impact on the medium.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pat Steir</span> American painter and printmaker (born 1940)

Pat Steir is an American painter and printmaker. Her early work was loosely associated with conceptual art and minimalism, however, she is best known for her abstract dripped, splashed and poured "Waterfall" paintings, which she started in the 1980s, and for her later site-specific wall drawings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Judy Fox</span> American sculptor

Judy Fox is an American sculptor who was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1957. She studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1976, earned a BA from Yale University in 1978, studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts Paris, France in 1979, and received an MFA from New York University in 1983. She was an art student at the time when figurative art was submerged by abstraction, and took that as a challenge. In 2006, she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship. Fox is a faculty member at the New York Academy of Art. Judy Fox lives and works in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William G. Tucker</span> British sculptor

William G. Tucker is a modernist British sculptor and modern art scholar.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diana al-Hadid</span> American artist

Diana al-Hadid is a Syrian-born American contemporary artist who creates sculptures, installations, and drawings using various media. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Judith Shea</span> American sculptor and artist (born 1948)

Judith Shea is an American sculptor and artist, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1948. She received a degree in fashion design at Parsons School of Design in 1969 and a BFA in 1975. This dual education formed the basis for her figure based works. Her career has three distinct phases: The use of cloth and clothing forms from 1974 to 1981; Hollow cast metal clothing-figure forms from 1982 until 1991; and carved full-figure statues made of wood, cloth, clay, foam and hair beginning in 1990 to present.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jessica Stockholder</span> American artist

Jessica Stockholder is a Canadian-American artist known for site-specific installation works and sculptures that are often described as "paintings in space." She came to prominence in the early 1990s with monumental works that challenged boundaries between artwork and display environment as well as between pictorial and physical experience. Her art often presents a "barrage" of bold colors, textures and everyday objects, incorporating floors, walls and ceilings and sometimes spilling out of exhibition sites. Critics suggest that her work is informed by diverse artistic traditions, including abstract expressionism, color field painting, minimalism and Pop art. Since her early career, they have noted in her work an openness to spontaneity, accident and marginality and a rejection of permanency, monetization and disciplinary conventions that Stephen Westfall characterized as an "almost shocking sense of freedom."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Annabeth Rosen</span> American artist

Annabeth Rosen is an American sculptor best known for abstract ceramic works, as well as drawings. She is considered part of a second generation of Bay Area ceramic artists after the California Clay Movement, who have challenged ceramic traditions involving expression, form and function and helped spur the medium's acceptance in mainstream contemporary sculpture. Rosen's sculptures range from monumental to tabletop-sized, and emerge out of an accumulative bricolage process combining dozens or hundreds of fabricated parts and clay fragments and discards. Reviewers characterize her art as deliberately raw, both muscular and unapologetic feminine, and highly abstract yet widely referential in its suggestions of humanoid, botanical, aquatic, artificial, even science-fictional qualities. Critic Kay Whitney wrote that her work is "visceral in its impact, violent even, but also sensual and evocative" and "floats between the poles of the comic and the mordant."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donald Lipski</span> American sculptor (born 1947)

Donald Lipski is an American sculptor best known for his installation work and large-scale public works.

Nancy Grossman is an American artist. Grossman is best known for her wood and leather sculptures of heads.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara Kasten</span>

Barbara Kasten is an American artist from Chicago Illinois. Her work involves the use of abstract video and photograph projections.

Maureen Connor is an American artist who creates installations and videos dealing with human resources and social justice. She is known internationally for her work from the 1980s to the present, which focuses on gender and its modes of representation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harry Kramer (American artist)</span> American painter

Harry Kramer is an American abstract painter, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1962 he received a BFA from The University of Arts and earned an MFA from Yale University in 1965.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth King (artist)</span> American artist

Elizabeth King is an American sculptor and writer known for movable figurative sculptures that she has employed in stop-frame animations. Her work combines exacting handcraft, elementary mechanics, and digital and electronic technologies, applied in sculptures of half or full figures, heads, arms and hands, or even simply eyes. She often equips figures with subtly illuminated eyes and visible and invisible mechanisms enabling the performance of anatomically correct simple operations, seemingly of their own volition. Writers have described her figures as "insistently nonhuman" yet "uncannily alive" in their ability to project self-awareness, intelligence, agency and emotion. They reflect her interests in early clockwork automata, the history of the mannequin and puppet, literature involving unnatural figures come to life, and human movement. Art in America critic Leah Ollman wrote that King's "highly articulated automatons invite us to consider how consciousness arises from physical being … she portrays her mechanical surrogates as convincingly self-aware, while we are left to ponder that age-old question: where exactly does the self reside?"

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nade Haley</span> American artist

Nade Haley was an American visual artist whose work has been exhibited at numerous museums and galleries, and is held in public and private collections. After relocating from Washington DC, Haley lived and kept studios in New York City and in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

Mary Lum is an American visual artist whose paintings, collages and works on paper reference the urban environment, architectural forms and systems. Critic John Yau writes, "Mary Lum’s paintings on paper are based on collages, which are made from things she uses or encounters in her everyday life as well as photographs she takes of the places she visits. "

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elana Herzog</span> American artist

Elana Herzog is an American installation artist and sculptor based in New York City. She is most known for abstract, tactile works in which she disassembles, reconfigures and embeds second-hand textiles in walls, modular panels and architectural spaces with industrial-grade metal staples. Herzog has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, among others. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), Tang Museum, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Sharjah Art Museum, and Reykjavik Art Museum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Heide Fasnacht</span> American visual artist

Heide Fasnacht is a New York City-based artist who works in sculpture, drawing, painting and installation art. Her work explores states of flux, instability and transformation caused by human action and natural events. Since the mid-1990s, she has been known for sculptures and drawings that recreate momentary phenomena such as sneezes, geysers and demolitions—in sometimes abstract or cartoony form—that are temporally and spatially "frozen" for consideration of their aesthetic, perceptual, social or sensate qualities. In the late 2010s, she has expanded these themes in paintings that examine lost and neglected childhood sites, such as playgrounds and amusement parks. ARTnews critic Ken Shulman has described her work as "chart[ing] the fluid dialogue between second and third dimensions, motion and inertia, creation and ruin."

References

  1. ↑ "Judy Pfaff . Biography . Documentary Film". Art21. PBT. Retrieved 2011-05-30.
  2. ↑ "Fellows Judy Pfaff". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved April 10, 2018.
  3. 1 2 "National Endowment for the Arts Annual Report 1986" (PDF). National Endowment for the Arts. Retrieved April 10, 2018.
  4. 1 2 "Judy Pfaff - MacArthur Foundation". www.macfound.org. Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  5. 1 2 Sandler, Irving; Panczenko, Russell (2003). "Judy Pfaff".{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  6. ↑ "Saint Louis Art Museum Exhibition Archive" . Retrieved March 5, 2016.
  7. ↑ "Bard College professor Judy Pfaff elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences". 8 February 2014. Retrieved March 5, 2016.
  8. ↑ "Yoyogi, detail". Flickr. Retrieved 2018-04-08.
  9. ↑ "Judy Pfaff". Art21.
  10. 1 2 Princenthal, Nancy (2013). Judy Pfaff: Storming the White Cube, in After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art. Munich: Prestel. p. 127. ISBN   978-3-7913-4755-4.
  11. ↑ "Judy Pfaff: Early Works From the WSU Art Collection - University Art Collection - Wayne State University". artcollection.wayne.edu. 4 April 2019.
  12. ↑ "Judy Pfaff: Early Works From the WSU Art Collection - University Art Collection - Wayne State University". artcollection.wayne.edu. 4 April 2019. Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  13. ↑ Richards, Judith. "Oral history interview with Judy Pfaff, 2010 Jan. 27-Feb. 4". Archives of American Art. Retrieved 2013-02-16.
  14. 1 2 3 Genocchio, Benjamin (May 22, 2005). "Now She Can Finish That Warehouse". New York Times.
  15. ↑ "Academics / Faculty : Judy Pfaff, Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts; Codirector, Studio Arts Program". Bard College.
  16. 1 2 3 4 Mahoney, Brian K. "Portfolio: Judy Pfaff". Chronogram. Retrieved 30 March 2019.
  17. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 "Judy Pfaff … all of the above". Rice Gallery. 2007. Retrieved 30 March 2019.
  18. 1 2 3 < -- not stated--> (2019). "About". Judy Pfaff Studio. Retrieved 30 March 2019.
  19. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 "Judy Pfaff Biography". Artnet. 2011. Retrieved 30 March 2019.
  20. 1 2 3 4 5 "Judy Pfaff". Art21. 8 June 2012. Retrieved 30 March 2019.
  21. 1 2 < -- not stated--> (2019). "About". Judy Pfaff Studio. Retrieved 30 March 2019.
  22. ↑ Heartney, Eleanor; Posner, Helaine; Princenthal, Nancy; Scott, Sue (2007). After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art. New York: Prestel. pp. 137–138. ISBN   978-3-7913-3732-6.
  23. ↑ Pfaff, Judy (2008). "Buckets of Rain". The Georgia Review. 62 (3 (FALL 2008)): 523–532. JSTOR   41403026.
  24. ↑ Castro, Jan Garden (2008). "New York: Judy Pfaff: Ameringer Yohe Fine Art". Sculpture. 27: 70–71 – via EBSCOhost.
  25. ↑ Kardon, Dennis (2015). "Judy Pfaff". Art in America. 103: 90 – via Ebsco.
  26. ↑ Mahoney, Brian K. (March 1, 2007). "Portfolio: Judy Pfaff". Chronogram Magazine. Retrieved 2011-05-30.
  27. ↑ Rooney, Kara L. (October 2010). "Judy Pfaff: Five Decades". The Brooklyn Rail.
  28. ↑ "Judy Pfaff. Blue Vase with Nasturtiums. 1987 | MoMA". The Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  29. ↑ "Judy Pfaff | Squash". whitney.org. Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  30. ↑ "Brooklyn Museum". www.brooklynmuseum.org. Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  31. ↑ "You are being redirected..." www.dia.org. Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  32. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "CV". Judy Pfaff Studio. 2019. Retrieved 30 March 2019.
  33. ↑ "Francis J. Greenburger Awards". artomi.org. Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  34. ↑ "Renowned artist Judy Pfaff comes to Tyler School of Art". Temple Now | news.temple.edu. 2017-04-03. Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  35. ↑ "Judy Pfaff & Ursula von Rydingsvard - Lifetime Achievement Awards - Sculpture.org". www.sculpture.org. Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  36. ↑ "Recipients to Date". Anonymous Was A Woman. Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  37. ↑ "SGC International - SGC International Awards". www.sgcinternational.org. Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  38. ↑ "United States Artists » Judy Pfaff" . Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  39. ↑ "2020 Art Award Winners – American Academy of Arts and Letters" . Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  40. ↑ "Awards For Distinction | Sam Fox School". www.samfoxschool.wustl.edu. Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  41. ↑ "Judy Pfaff Biography – Judy Pfaff on artnet". www.artnet.com. Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  42. ↑ "Nancy Graves Foundation grant program". Nancy Graves Foundation. Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  43. ↑ "WheatonArts » Explore, Experience, Create" . Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  44. ↑ "Judy Pfaff's CV". Messums Wiltshire. Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  45. ↑ "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Judy Pfaff" . Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  46. ↑ "Reed College | Art | Events | Ostrow | Judy Pfaff". www.reed.edu. Retrieved 2020-08-28.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.