Louise Nevelson. Persistence Exhibition - Collateral event of the 59th Venice Biennale - Text by Julia Bryan-Wilson

Louise Nevelson. Persistence

Collateral event of the 59th Venice Biennale

Procuratie Vechie, Venice

23 April - 11 September 2022

Text by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, UC Berkeley

Organized to mark the 60th anniversary of Louise Nevelson’s landmark presentation in the American Pavilion of the 31st Venice Biennale in 1962, this exhibition focuses on the genre that would prove to be Nevelson’s most definitive contribution to twentieth-century art: assemblage. Bringing together more than sixty works spanning thirty years of production, the exhibition underscores the artist’s extraordinarily inventive combining of materials, including well-known monumental black gridded walls and smaller, lesser-known collages that feature a range of colors and were made with everyday stuff like newsprint, flattened bits of metal, cardboard, foil, sandpaper, and fabric. Collectively, these works demonstrate a remarkable persistence: Nevelson’s brave commitment both to her steadfast aesthetic and to an ethics of reuse.

The exhibition’s title also alludes to Nevelson’s unique status as one of the most influential figures in the history of modern art. In an essay published the same year as the Biennale, Italian art critic Carla Lonzi, who later became an important feminist activist, described “a new, proliferating presence of a totally female ambiguity” in Nevelson’s work. Nevelson herself would describe her process in similarly gendered terms, explaining that “the word creation is like the earth, the volcanoes, the mother who has her labor pains....” Nevelson’s use of “low,” throwaway objects—and her repurposing of familiar items like wooden headboards, brooms, chair legs, and dust pans—evoked the domestic sphere, but also had special resonance in Italy during the emergence of Arte Povera in the 1960s. Today, Nevelson is widely acknowledged as a foremother of many feminist artists who recycle scavenged domestic things.

Though the immediate critical reception of her environments in the American Pavilion was mixed, the 1962 Biennale marked a definitive turning point in Nevelson’s career. Reflecting on this exhibit sixty years later gives us an opportunity to reconsider her prescient use of immersive environments and her ground-breaking incorporation of gendered objects. Installed nonchronologically to highlight the overarching continuities in her practice around assemblage, Persistence affirms Nevelson’s ongoing relevance for contemporary audiences.

PROCURATIE VECHIE

Piazza San Marco 1218/B, Venezia

www.labiennale.org

Updated Post 12.02.2025

Robert Colescott, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis - Recent Paintings - Touring Exhibition following its premiere at the 47th Venice Biennale

Robert Colescott: Recent Paintings

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

January 24 - April 5, 1998

"There's a comic-maniac edge to these paintings produced by gross exaggerations and crazy juxtapositions. It's expressive of the insane collage of relationships I'm dealing with." -Robert Colescott

Following its premiere at the 47th Venice Biennale, the exhibition Robert Colescott: Recent Paintings begins a two-year United States tour at the Walker Art Center. Organized by independent curator Miriam Roberts for SITE Santa Fe, the exhibition honors Arizona-based artist ROBERT COLESCOTT, the first painter to represent the United States at the Biennale since Jasper Johns in 1988, and the first African-American artist to represent the United States in a solo exhibition at the prestigious festival.

On view in the exhibition are 20 paintings from the past decade that employ a figurative vocabulary that challenges stereotypes and engenders debate on the state of human relations in the United States. Now 72, the Arizona-based Robert Colescott continues to produce vitally significant work and is an important role model for a younger generation of artists exploring issues of racialization, identity, power, and gender. Employing a highly personal combination of narrative figuration blended with an ironic viewpoint to address the major social issues of his time, Robert Colescott has created one of the most powerful bodies of work in recent American art.

According to curator Miriam Roberts, "Like the world they depict, Colescott's polyrhythmic, improvisational paintings are full of surprises--in juxtapositions of forms and colors, in distortions of scale, in inventions and interplays of space and structure. They are filled with diverse references to the history of art itself, not only in homages to specific paintings, but to the traditional conventions of his chosen medium - history painting, portraiture, landscape, still life and allegory.

"Simultaneously seductive, hilarious and disturbing, the paintings of Robert Colescott depict a world of contradictions and dichotomies--between art and life, tragedy and comedy, men and women, black and white, oppressor and victim, Europe and Africa, past and present. It is a world of exploitation, missed opportunities, unfulfilled potential and lost love. Above all, it is a world of ironies, where people, things and events are never quite what they first seem."

Robert Colescott: Recent Paintings begins with works from 1987, a year that marked a turning point in the artist's career. Though he continued to use satire and narrative figuration, he moved beyond the controversial images of racial stereotypes for which he had become known. Colescott expanded his range and began exploring universal themes, venturing into the realm of mythological and religious allegory and sophisticated literary allusions. Writing in Arts magazine in 1988, Linda McGreevy said: "Colescott proves himself a moralist, a history painter in the deepest sense, whose webs of cultural cause and effect have come full circle to illuminate the present."

Born in Oakland, California, in 1925, ROBERT COLESCOTT studied at the University of California at Berkeley and with Fernand Léger in Paris before participating in the resurgence of figurative art on the West Coast during the 1950s. But it was his sojourn in Cairo, Egypt, in the 1960s that compelled the artist to infuse his work with a dynamic blend of color, historical reference, and style. Three thousand years of non-European art, a strong narrative tradition, formal qualities such as the fluidity of the graphic line, monumentality of scale, vivid color, and a sense of pattern--all these elements had a profound, immediate, and lasting impact on his work. Emeritus Professor at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Colescott has received numerous awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1980, 1983) and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for Creative Painting and Drawing (1985).

An illustrated catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition contains essays by Miriam Roberts and Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, curator of 20th-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, and a leading Colescott scholar; a poem by Peabody Award and American Book Award-winning poet Quincy Troupe; a photographic portrait by photographer and conceptual artist Carrie Mae Weems; an exhibition checklist; and selected biographical information.

The exhibition is an official presentation of the U.S. Government and was organized by Miriam Roberts for the U.S. Pavilion at the 47th Venice Biennale in association with SITE Santa Fe.

WALKER ART CENTER

Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN 55403

www.walkerart.org

Australia at the 1997 Venice Biennale - Kwementyai Kngwarreye, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Judy Watson: Fluent

Australia at the 1997 Venice Biennale

Kwementyai Kngwarreye, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Judy Watson: Fluent

17 June - 9 November 1997

Kwementyai Kngwarreye, Yvonne Koolmatrie and Judy Watson's representation in the 47th Venice Biennale is the first time Aboriginal women have been exhibited at the most prestigious international event in the visual art world's calendar.

"Like the many canals that weave through Venice, the exhibition explores the subtle connections between works which suggest a continuous ebb and flow between modernity and tradition, art and craft, painting and sculpture, abstraction and narrative. fluent celebrates and pays tribute to the survival of Aboriginal culture on the international stage, reflecting the culture and creativity of both regional and urban communities." (Curatorium)

The title, fluent, not only suggests the visual fluidity of the artists' works and the intuitive nature of their creation, it also connotes the oral traditions of Aboriginal culture and the many languages that make up Aboriginal Australia.

Kwementyai Kngwarreye, Yvonne Koolmatrie and Judy Watson create individual, bold and contemporary interpretations of a heritage that is 40,000 years old. These artists exemplify the challenging and innovative direction both urban and regional Aboriginal art has taken in the past decade.

KWEMENTYAI KNGWARREYE passed away last year and was believed to be in her eighties. In accordance with Aboriginal custon, the full name of the artist is not written or spoken out of respect for the deceased and their family. The substitute Kwementyai (meaning 'no name') and the artist's skin name, Kngwarreye, is used.

Kngwarreye is considered to be one of the most significant of Australia's contemporary artists. Her work is represented in major public and private collections in Australia and overseas. In 1992, she was the first Aboriginal artist to be awarded an Australian Artists Creative Fellowship. Kngwarreye lived a traditional lifestyle and worked on a cattle station in the outback of Australia in her youth. After a lifetime of traditional cultural practice, Kngwarreye was introduced to non-traditional art practices in her late sixties. Initially working with batik, it was not until over a decade later that Kngwarreye found the medium she came to master, painting on canvas.

fluent focuses on Kngwarreye's 'stripe' paintings which suddenly appeared in late 1993, disrupting her famous fields of shimmering dots. A spiritual analogy is made between the stripes of her paintings and the traditional body paint of Kngwarreye's awelye, yam dreaming cycles.

YVONNE KOOLMATRIE is recognised as one of the leading weavers in Australia, practising a rare form of Ngarrindjari weaving traditional to the Riverland country of South Australia. Originally intended to exist in the physical world of water, Koolmatrie's weavings are seemingly weightless and reveal the hand of the artist. Made of sedge grass reeds from the River Murray, chosen for their strength, colour and fragrance, Koolmatrie's weavings have an inherent gracefulness and balance which distinguishes her work.

JUDY WATSON, unlike the other two artists, trained in a formal academic system. As a Waanyi artist, Watson has said her work is about "memories washing over me". She regularly travels to her country in North West Queensland (Waanyi country), to draw inspiration from her rich personal and communal histories. Using principles of abstraction she exposes the hidden stories of the Australian colonial experience. The rich deeply textured surfaces, etched with innumerable marks and meanders, are breathtakingly beautiful. Her fluid painting style is enhanced as her unstretched canvasses float on the wall.

Watson has travelled extensively and held international residencies in Banff in Canada, Bhopal in India, Tuscany in Italy, Lillehammer in Norway and New Zealand. She was a recipient of the 1995 Möet & Chandon Fellowship and undertook a one year residency in France.

Australia's 1997 Venice Biennale curatorial team, consisting of curators, Hetti Perkins and Brenda L.Croft and coordinating curator Victoria Lynn, make an ideal blend of professional indigenous and contemporary art expertise.

HETTI PERKINS of the Arrernte people is an independent curator based in Sydney and has worked as a curator of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative and The Art Gallery of New South Wales. BRENDA L. CROFT of the Gurindji people is a practising artist, an independent curator and was General Manager of Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative. VICTORIA LYNN is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The exhibition fluent has been supported by The Art Gallery of New South Wales. The assistance of Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative is gratefully acknowledged. This project has been assisted by the Australia Council, the Federal Government's arts funding and advisory body. The support of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commision is also acknowledged.

MICHAEL LYNCH, General Manager of the Australia Council, is the Commissioner for the Australian Pavilion.

Australia has officially participated in the Venice Biennale since 1954 when an exhibition of Sidney Nolan's work was presented. From 1978 the Australia Council became involved in selecting the artists to be exhibited and commenced funding Australia's participation, securing a site for Australia's own Pavillion in 1988.

THE ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au