BIG Picture: Alumnae Makers and Shakers in the Visual Arts
By Harper Montgomery ’94
Mount Holyoke alumnae are major players in the art world today. Making art relevant in a world where it’s becoming less and less visible is the difficult challenge that all of these women embrace. None of them could imagine doing anything else. But their passion for art is matched with the vision and tenacity that has made them important leaders in the field. Being influencers in the art world—innovative makers and leaders in shaping conversations about how art is exhibited and studied—requires an intellectual curiosity and seriousness of purpose that was for all of them fostered by early experiences at Mount Holyoke.
The seductive beauty of objects was what first attracted Marcia Gagliardi Brennan (art historian, class of 1988, shown at left) to the study of art. She remembers sitting in Louisa McDonald’s Asian art course first semester of her first year thinking, “These are the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen—I want to do this with the rest of my life.” Her professors in the art history department at Mount Holyoke gave her, she says, the vision of what was possible.
Even at its most theoretical, Brennan’s innovative scholarship has remained grounded in her love of objects. After developing her interest in critical theory and intellectual history at Brown University, where she earned a PhD in art history in 1997, Brennan pursued research in two books on how gender relationships have affected the reception of modernist paintings at different moments in the twentieth century. Although her early scholarship was grounded in gender theory, Brennan’s writing challenged gender studies to expand its breadth by looking at how Eros—heterosexual femininity and heterosexual masculinity—has historically framed viewers’ aesthetic experiences of art.
The interdisciplinary nature of her approach to art history is most apparent in the courses she teaches at Rice University, where she has been a tenured associate professor since 2005 (and assistant professor since 2001). In a course cross-listed in the religious studies department, Brennan asks students to consider how modern museums function as ritual spaces. In another, designed for premed as well as art history students, she and her students examine how scientific and cultural meanings are inscribed onto images of the body. Although she is still engaged with questions of how bodies and art interact, Brennan’s interests have shifted during the past several years from gender to mysticism. In an upcoming book, she looks at how mysticism inflected the way modern paintings were exhibited and experienced during the mid-twentieth century. And she continues to work to insert visual art into cultural history, compelling us to consider how art contributes to broader questions about how we understand our world.
Because she wanted to pursue her interest in feminism, as well as find a place that would nurture her intellectual independence, Elizabeth Dee ’95, like many graduates since the 1980s, consciously chose a single-sex college. Dee (shown above in the NYC gallery she owns) pursued her studies of feminist theory and philosophy at Mount Holyoke, while majoring in studio art. The intellectual independence she developed in the process helped give her the confidence to pursue an unconventional career path in the visual arts.
Dee’s calling though, it turns out, was not making art. After graduating from Mount Holyoke, she moved to San Francisco, where she worked for Daniel Weinberg, a gallery owner who had helped develop the careers of artists including Brice Marden, Richard Tuttle, Carroll Dunham, Sherrie Levine, and other significant figures of the 1970s and ’80s. “I realized [at Weinberg’s] that a gallery was like a living museum and that one person could get so much done for great artists as a gallerist.” Working at the gallery helped her come to the thrilling realization “that I could be of real value” to the process of developing an artist’s career. Dee also discovered that she enjoyed bringing collectors and artists together. So, at the young age of twenty-one, it became clear to her that this was what she should do with her life.
Dee moved to New York and opened her own gallery in 1998; since the fall of 2002, she has run her gallery in a storefront space in Chelsea.
Her roster of conceptual artists is intergenerational. Adrian Piper is a notable recent addition, and Josephine Meckseper is another conceptual artist whose career has gained critical recognition under Dee’s representation. “I find that I’m attracted to working with women,” she has said. “They are just as ambitious as male artists, but issues of perception and power in the art market affect them differently, and I like the way this makes me think more strategically and creatively about their careers.” Dee has also worked to fight the sexism of the market when it comes to contemporary art, raising the asking prices of her female artists’ work to prices comparable to those of male peers’ art. “It’s our job to make things valuable,” she says, “because, with more power, artists have a bigger playing field to work on.”
Judy Mann (curator, class of 1972, shown at left), curator of European Art to 1800 at the Saint Louis Art Museum, has also worked to level the playing field for women artists. Her work, though, has pertained to how we understand the history of art, a passion that was ignited by a Romanesque and Gothic architecture course she took to fulfill a requirement during her first year. “I fell for it hook, line and sinker,” she remembers, and art history transformed her, as she tells it, into a serious student. Although she was not necessarily looking to attend a women’s college, Mann found that being in a single-sex environment gave her the confidence necessary to pursue her passion.
She developed an interest in the more enigmatic artists of the Italian Baroque period while pursuing a PhD at Washington University. Throughout her career as a curator and professor (she initially taught university students after earning her doctorate and continues to teach on occasion), Mann has focused on artists who challenge the conventions of their historical periods.
The question, “What is the Baroque?” fueled her dissertation research on Guido Reni, and has continued to frame the research she has conducted as a curator on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century, respectively, Italian artists Federico Barocci and Artemisia Gentileschi.
Her rigorous scholarship has enriched audiences’ understanding of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian painting by expanding the canon of painters. While she does not see herself as a feminist scholar (although she does consider herself a feminist), her work on Artemisia Gentileschi brought recognition to a woman artist whose painting was still considered somewhat minor before the exhibition featuring Artemisia and her father, Orazio, appeared at the Saint Louis Art Museum in 2002. (Mann co-organized this exhibition with Keith Christiansen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; she was responsible for the aspects of the exhibition having to do with Gentileschi’s work.)
Questioning the idea of greatness is a worthwhile endeavor for Mann. “There is no question that there are very few Michelangelos,” she has said, but she reminds us that looking “at only the great ones, you lose so much of the richness of the history of art.” The upcoming exhibition of the paintings and drawings of Federico Barocci that she is organizing, which is scheduled to open in 2010 at the Saint Louis Art Museum, should further expand on the idea of Baroque painting, while also dazzling audiences with the paintings’ dynamic compositions and richly saturated palettes.
Kc Maurer (chief financial officer of the Andy Warhol Foundation, class of 1984, shown at right) came to work in the visual arts largely by a stroke of good luck. Working in the private sector with an MBA, she found that “the bottom line was no longer getting her out of bed in the morning,” and during the summer of 1998 she decided to make a change. One of her first jobs after graduating from Mount Holyoke had been at the University of Massachusetts Fine Arts Center, where her office was in the art gallery. She had always wanted to return to work that supported the arts.
For almost a decade, as chief financial officer of the Andy Warhol Foundation, Maurer has overseen the operations of a foundation that provides one of the most significant sources of support for contemporary art in the United States. What makes the foundation’s work so rewarding, Maurer explains, is that its mission is broadly defined as promoting “the advancement of the visual arts,” which means that it can be extraordinarily nimble in how it responds to the needs of artists and institutions. Supporting innovative contemporary art, promoting art in underserved communities, and responding to the needs of artists in the Gulf area after Hurricane Katrina are just some of the ways the foundation has met its mandate.
“I recognize we’re not curing cancer, but we are really adding to the fabric of people’s lives,” Maurer says. “One of the things that the foundation attempts to do is to provide funding for works and institutions that will make people think, in places in this country where contemporary art gets short shrift.”
A recent gift of Warhol photographs to a community college in western Wyoming and funding for arts organizations in isolated rural communities are just two examples of initiatives that amplify contemporary art’s presence outside of urban areas. Working with art and among artists (half of the foundation’s staff are working visual artists) has also brought Maurer an inordinate degree of job satisfaction. “One of the things I love most is that I learn new things every day.”
Joan Edwards Jonas’s (artist, class of 1958, shown at left) works in performance and video have been recognized as among the most innovative artworks produced during the 1960s and ’70s in the United States. Her current work continues to be critically acclaimed and internationally exhibited. In performances and videos that use her own body (and others’) to examine how we perceive space and understand narratives, Jonas literally helped invent “installation art” and develop a multimedia approach to art making. Both are now taken for granted as the lingua franca of contemporary art.
After being encouraged to pursue art by sculptor/ professor Henry Rox at Mount Holyoke, more training at the Museum School in Boston, and an MFA at Columbia, Jonas became a part of a group of young artists active in the downtown art scene in New York during the early 1960s. Dissatisfied with her sculpture, she found herself attending happenings like the now-legendary Nine Evenings and events at Judson Church where historic figures such as La Monte Young and Claes Oldenburg presented the first iterations of performance art. In happenings and performance art, “you could include everything in one form, you weren’t confined to making an object,” she explains. She was attracted to these new genres’ omnivorous approaches to artistic media and traditional academic disciplines, which broke down the barriers among sculpture, painting, dance, and literature.
Feminism and the gendered body became central themes in Jonas’s work at the end of the 1960s and during the early 1970s. The politics of feminism were, she remembers, “important for me and for my generation,” but thinking about her identity as a woman was intrinsic to her work from the beginning. In many ways, her work is more relevant today as critics and art historians reassess how women artists have influenced art production generally. Currently, her work appears in the exhibition, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and on view at PS1 in New York through May 12).
Harper Montgomery ’94, a critic and independent curator living in New York, is writing a dissertation on avant-garde artists in Mexico City and Buenos Aires.
Photos by Tommy Lavergne (Brennan), Joe Lawton (Dee, Jonas, Maurer), and Tim Parker (Mann)
Joan Edwards Jonas
- Jonas's art is part of the exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and on view at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York City through May 12).
- Electronic Arts Intermix features a biography of Jonas, a filmography with descriptions, and a bibliography of materials written about Jonas's work.
Elizabeth Dee
- Learn more about the Elizabeth Dee Gallery. The site notes that the gallery represents "esteemed international artists who employ rigorous practices within an innovative curatorial model. Our intergenerational program reflects socio-political topics and questions issues and modes of representation."
Judy Mann
- Find out more about the Saint Louis Art Museum, including curator Judy Mann's bailiwick, early European art, here. Learn about the art of Artemisia Gentileschi. The site also features an image of the Saint Louis Art Museum's painting Danae, by Gentileschi.
Marcia Gagliardi Brennan
- See art historian Marcia Brennan's Rice University profile, with links to her recent scholarly work. Here are more details about her publications, and teaching and research interests.
KC Maurer
- The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts web site has information on exhibitions of Warhol's work and grant guidelines for institutions. Grant guidelines for individual artists can be found at www.creative-capital.org.
- Additional information about exhibitions of Warhol's work is at the web site of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. The Andy Warhol Foundation donated more than 4,000 works for the museum’s founding collection.
- Maurer's path from MHC to her current position as chief financial officer of the Andy Warhol Foundation is outlined in an article about Smart Moves for Liberal Arts Grads: Finding a Path to Your Perfect Career, in which Maurer is featured.
