Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City
June 2 – August 27, 2023
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art presents Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence, the first retrospective exhibition by New York-based artist Virginia Jaramillo (Mexican American, born 1939).
Virginia Jaramillo has been at the heart of influential movements in American post-war abstraction for decades. She was born in El Paso, TX, raised in Los Angeles, CA, and moved to New York City in 1966 after a year in Paris. When she settled in Soho at 109 Spring Street in the late-1960s, Virginia Jaramillo’s neighbors were artists Frederick James Brown, Mark di Suvero, Donald Judd, and Joan Semmel, alongside other influential New York artists, musicians, and writers. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, she participated in artist organizations and groups including the New York Feminist Art Institute and the 120 Wooster Street Collective. During this period, her work was included in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, CA; and the California Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles, CA, among others. Notable examples include The De Luxe Show in 1971 in Houston, TX (considered the first racially integrated exhibition in the U.S. to gain national attention) and Women Artists of the 80’s, in 1984 at A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY.
The significance of Virginia Jaramillo’s work has been affirmed in recent groundbreaking group exhibitions including Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 (Hammer Museum, 2011); We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 (Brooklyn Museum, 2017); and Women in Abstraction (Centre Pompidou, 2021); yet there has not been a comprehensive presentation of the 84-year-old artist’s practice and impact before Principle of Equivalence.
Throughout her career, Virginia Jaramillo has explored earthly and metaphysical realms through abstract paintings and handmade paper works with such diverse interests as physics, the cosmos, mythology, ancient cultures, and modernist design philosophies. This exhibition presents more than 70 exceptional paintings and handmade paper works, including her breakthrough Curvilinear series and large-scale linen fiber work, Anonymous Site #1-603 (1990) from Kemper Museum’s Permanent Collection.
“This exhibition is a milestone in the artist’s career and serves as a reminder to look with intention toward those who have made important—if historically excluded—contributions to the history of American abstraction,” said Erin Dziedzic, director of curatorial affairs for Kemper Museum. “Tracing the impact of Jaramillo’s practice, the exhibition will feature early examples that pushed the depth of the painted surface to its very limits, innovations in the centuries-old practice of handmade papermaking, and recent large-scale paintings in which Jaramillo abstracts the architectural ruins of spiritual sites.”
Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence is organized by Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri and curated by Erin Dziedzic, director of curatorial affairs.
A full-color catalogue in conjunction with this exhibition is distributed by Yale University Press.
