A great friend of mine recently gifted me sets of vintage Saturday Evening Posts. It’s interesting to look back on older ads, marketing, types of articles and interviews… Some really fantastic images. It’s also difficult to read without seeing extreme thoughts regarding gender roles and how extremely different races are portrayed. I suppose it’s an obvious lens of what is still prevalent but in some cases whispered discreetly. But it often gets me thinking which I think is a bonus - Where do we still need to refocus our understood norms? Why do we still think about behaving in certain ways that are antiquated to our lifetime? That kind of thing…
Before making this collage above, I was reading Ninth Street Women, and trying to find abstract art made by women in a book all about Abstract Expressionism for a collage I wanted to make. The challenge was frustrating. I ended up purchasing a slim copy of Frankenthaler’s work so that I could see more of it in a timeline…to explore her ideas as she explored them… to get into the mind of where she was coming from, to find context. It was an interesting exploration but bothersome that it took so much work to do so. People I discuss this frustration with often cite that there is at least a conversation starting to happen that is trickling to more and more people. I agree, it’s a start. But I don’t think I agree that it’s happening in a way that can affect change in big, meaningful, long lasting ways. Having a retrospective of Lee Krasner is great, but what now?? Mentioning that Hilma Af Klimt is in fact the original parent of Abstract art and not the step father, Kandinsky as we have thought for more than a hundred years is all great and the right thing to mention. But, knowing this now, how do we go about re-writing history’s timeline to reshape how that omission not only impacted the future of the movement and spoke to the larger issues at hand but, even more relevant, how are we going to change/alter/add to the official discussion of art history? What are we going to teach in schools and how? What are we going to display and how? Lots and lots of answerless questions…. And, yes, for now, we discuss and hope that discussions lead to something else. What that exactly is may be what we don’t yet understand fully enough to be able to ________.
