Modern Art

1. Melissa Sztuk: Mariana Yampolsky: Forming Identity and Narrative in Post-Revolutionary Mexico

2. Edit Tóth: Ruth Asawa: Weaving Space for Healing in 1950s America

3. Artie Foster: A Flexible Formalism: Frank Bowling and the use of abstract expressionism and pop in the Maps Paintings

ABSTRACTS

Modern Art—Chaired by Scott Sherer, University of Texas at San Antonio,

Melissa Sztuk

Texas Christian University

m.c.sztuk@tcu.edu

“Mariana Yampolsky: Forming Identity and Narrative in Post-Revolutionary Mexico”

Drawn by the work of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP), Mariana Yampolsky (1925-2002) arrived to Mexico City for the first time at age 19. The American-born printmaker and photographer would become the first woman to join the collective. Though in her artistic maturity she would move on almost exclusively to photography, the early period of Yampolsky’s career spent with the TGP is essential in the construction of her work. It not only was the reason for which she went to Mexico, where she would eventually become a naturalized citizen, but it was the basis upon which she formulated the narrative of both herself as an artist and of Mexico as a nation. Her participation in Estampas de la Revolución Mexicana (1947), an album of prints published by the TGP, is a strong example of this construction. The three prints she contributed speak to the album’s central theme of celebrating the revolutionary spirit throughout 20th-century Mexican history. However, as most of the events depicted occurred before many of the artists were born, the album is riddled with historical fictions. Yampolsky, like the others, was an artist, not a historian. She presented an imagined visual and historical product of the Mexican past to further the ideological goal of a revolutionary narrative in a post-revolutionary context. I argue that it was through the negotiation of revolutionary scenes such as these that the artist was able to strategically legitimize her own place within Mexican history and identity.

Edit Tóth

The University of Texas at San Antonio

edit.toth@utsa.edu

“Ruth Asawa: Weaving Space for Healing in 1950s America”

Photographs by Imogen Cunningham show Ruth Asawa, Japanese-American artist and educator, inside of her hanging wire sculptures created during the early-mid-1950s, after she moved to San Francisco from Black Mountain College. Isamu Noguchi's Akari lamps developed around the same time from the Japanese paper lantern tradition that took on new commemorative purpose after World War II, whereas Yayoi Kusama created her first Infinity Nets in the later 1950s. The contextual and practice-oriented reading of Asawa's sculptures serves as a case study in exploring identity and ways of healing by a Japanese woman in postwar America troubled by racism and war inflected wounds. The paper will inquire into Asawa's artistic techniques and practices in the context of wartime internment, 1950s US-Japanese relations, San Francisco's artistic and bohemian scene, and the emergence of "therapeutic culture." In particular, her works will be correlated with the counter-cultural writer Alan Watts's Zen Buddhism and concept of the self as process, in place of the "skin-encapsulated ego." In San Francisco he advocated Zen through his books and popular media channels as a type of psycho-therapy and transformative practice relatable to patterns of nature, gardening, and other work processes. Asawa's artistic philosophy, work, and later teaching at a self-founded public art school advanced similar ideas not only as a way of self-healing and self-transformation but also as an avenue for personal growth.

Artie Foster

University of Illinois at Chicago

afoste29@uic.edu

“A Flexible Formalism: Frank Bowling and the use of abstract expressionism and pop in the Maps Paintings”

While Frank Bowling’s Maps Paintings (c. 1969-71) have received scholarly attention for their apparent compatibilities with theories of decolonization and postcolonialism, fewer studies have focused on Bowling’s confrontation of competing artistic styles of the day. Notably, Bowling juxtaposes abstract expressionist color-fields, invoking Rothko and Newman, with a pop vernacular of mass-producible stencils and market-friendly color palettes, reminiscent of Warhol and Lichtenstein. With historical hindsight, one might even say that Bowling’s work visually captures some of the messiness of the transition from a modernist to a postmodernist paradigm: Bowling holds onto a modernist interest in art’s autonomy and the universal human capacity for perception, while invoking increasingly popular forms of cultural politics, including strains of Pan-Africanism and the U.S. Black Arts Movement.

This paper argues, then, that Bowling’s Maps Paintings gesture towards the continuing vitality of a formalist tradition in the early 1970s, and even makes a case for its expanding repertoire – including Bowling’s signature mixture of dripping, pouring, stenciling, and spray-painting – at a time when art world reverence for formalism was in decline. That Bowling was able to apply these formalist innovations while still remaining healthily skeptical about modernism’s legacy speaks to his abstraction’s elasticity in this era of transition. These stylistic confrontations proved formative for Bowling’s eventual adoption of total abstraction – they allowed him to overcome the specificity of his own identity as a black, diasporic subject in a milieu which increasingly pigeonholed artists into narrower movements, without negating concerns about the racist, exclusionary practices of the art world.