Exhibitions

Improvisational quilter Rosie Lee Tompkins was virtually unknown by the general public during her lifetime—an anonymity she not only welcomed, but carefully cultivated. Now, with two new Bay Area shows at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and Anthony Meier Fine Arts, the virtuosic talent likely has more work on view at one time than ever before. 
There’s just one catch—and it’s one that makes growing the public’s understanding of Tompkins’s work, not to mention her market, a unique challenge. The artist had a single primary patron who assembled a large collection of her work—and donated it en masse to one museum. How do you grow a legacy, and a collector base, when an oeuvre is so centralized?
Tompkins, whose real name was Effie Mae Howard (the pseudonym was a privacy safeguard), was born in 1936 to a many-membered sharecropping family in southeastern Arkansas. Though she learned to quilt at an early age, it wasn’t until her mid-40s, working as a nurse in the Northern California town of Richmond, that she embraced the craft as more than a hobby.  
She would, for the next 25-plus years until her death in 2006, churn out hundreds of quilts, many intricate enough in their control of color and jazzy sense of composition to draw comparisons to the great abstractionists of the modern era.
Rosie Lee Tompkins, Untitled (c. 2002). Courtesy of BAMPFA.

“Tompkins’s work, I came to realize, was one of the century’s major artistic accomplishments, giving quilt-making a radical new articulation and emotional urgency,” New York Times critic Roberta Smith recently wrote of her experience seeing Tompkins’s work for the first time in 1997. “I felt I had been given a new standard against which to measure contemporary art.”
This snippet was one of many glowing passages in Smith’s 4,300-word review of Tompkins’s “triumphal retrospective” currently installed at BAMPFA. (The museum is currently closed due to California’s public-health protocols; it’s expected to reopen in the spring.) The article is one of the most rapturous pieces of criticism you may ever read. And she’s not the only one to consider Tompkins in such rarified air.
The demand for Tompkins’s work is as great as it’s ever been, but the supply is all but non-existent. That’s because her legacy grew late and fast; by the time her name was known by a larger audience, the majority of her work had been scooped up by a single enthusiastic collector named Eli Leon. He bought the works directly from Tompkins for what some estimate may have been a few thousand dollars each. 
So enthralled with Tompkins’s work was the collector that he asked for as much as $50,000 per piece from anyone who wanted to buy one from him—a whopping figure for an artist who was, at the time, a relatively unknown quantity. Because of this, Leon sold few. Before passing away in 2018, he arranged for his collection of quilts—including some 500 pieces by Tompkins—to be bequeathed to BAMPFA. 
Rosie Lee Tompkins, Untitled (date unknown). Courtesy of BAMPFA.

Today, very few of the artist’s pieces are in private hands, and none have ever appeared at auction, according to Artnet’s Price Database. They’ve only appeared in galleries a handful of times—which is what makes the current show of Tompkins’s work at Anthony Meier in San Francisco so noteworthy.
Eleven Tompkins quilts make up the exhibition, which Meier acquired directly from Tompkins’s family. (Meier says he doesn’t know how many more are out there, but he doubts there are any major untapped troves.) The price for each one hovers around the mid-to-high five-figure mark, the gallerist tells Artnet News, making Leon’s once-astronomical asks now seem reasonable. 
The show hasn’t sold out yet, but Meier says interest is coming from a much broader range of people than the gallery typically attracts. 
“If you combine the kind of praise that she has been accorded by people like Roberta Smith, with the incredibly limited supply and the kind of self-evident beauty of the work—it’s got three huge things going through it,” says Lawrence Rinder, BAMPFA’s longtime director and chief curator who organized the show. (Rinder retired in 2019.) “I’ve never been involved in the art market, thank goodness, but my gut feeling is that they’re worth a lot of money.” 
Because of that, Rinder says, the museum’s one-of-a-kind collection comes with a great deal of responsibility—a responsibility to shepherd Tompkins’s legacy, to both protect her life’s work and share it with as many people as possible. (Tompkins does not have a formal estate, as many late artists do.) What’s the prudent way to proceed?
Installation view of “Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective” at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2020-21. Courtesy of BAMPFA.

“This is a very, very important question for the museum right now,” the former director explains.
Rinder sees two possible directions in which the institution could go. One would be to hold onto all of Tompkins’s pieces and establish a research center dedicated to the artist, allowing scholars the opportunity to study the collection as a whole body of work even if it means limiting the public’s access to it. The other would be to strategically disperse the collection to other museums—be it through sale, long-term loan, or gift—in an effort to make it widely accessible, if decentralized. 
When asked which direction he would take, were he not retired, Rinder says this is an instance where you can “have your cake and eat it too.” 
“There are so many [of Tompkins’s artworks in the collection] that you could keep a core group and send the others out into the world. That way you’d be able to accomplish both things,” he says. “That’s what I would do.”
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When artist Shaun Leonardo was 21, his football coach once tried to amp him up by saying: “I want you to play like they just let you out of Riker’s.”
That off-the-cuff remark has stuck with Leonardo ever since, and informed his multidisciplinary practice, which probes notions of identity foisted upon Black and brown people.
In an exclusive interview with Art21 as part of its “New York Close Up” series, the Queens-born Leonardo speaks frankly about his experiences as both an athlete and an artist of color, and how he came to understand his identity through the impressions others had of him.
“As a young man… you don’t have the wherewithal or the tools to absorb that in a healthy manner,” he says of the incident with his coach. “I’m 40 years old and I’m still thinking about that moment.”
Much of Leonardo’s work deals with societal expectations of masculinity associated with sports. At one point during the interview, the artist pantomimes punching an invisible opponent, as he does in his early video works El Conquistador vs. The Invisible Man (2006) and Bull in the Ring (2008).
“I was offering the spectacle of violence and that identity of hyper-masculinity and aggression that is so often anticipated from a Black body,” he says. “We move through the world and serve as a mirror for white people’s projections.”

Still from Bull in the Ring (2008). Courtesy of Shaun Leonardo, archival media courtesy of Brad L. Cooper.

The artist recounts once seeing an image of Trayvon Martin and experiencing the recognition of how he, too, could be perceived by the outside world. That realization informed much of the drawings included in Leonardo’s new show, “The Breath of Empty Space,” at the Bronx Museum, which focuses on high-profile news stories about Black and brown men struggling with systemic violence, such as Martin, as well as lesser known incidents of police violence dating back to the 1970s.
When it comes to preconceived notions that white American have about their fellow Black and brown citizens, Leonardo says, “discovering and learning and finding ways to distort that image, to portray and feel deeply a fuller self that is not contained within these projections or these stereotypes. That has been my mandate.”

Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series Extended Play, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. “Shaun Leonardo: The Breath of Empty Space” is on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts through May 30, 2021. 
[embedded content]
This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org

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Thanks to an unexpected bequest, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art now boasts the largest collection of works by the Mannerist painter and nun Orsola Maddalena Caccia (1596–1676) outside the artist’s native Italy.
Upon hedge-fund manager Errol M. Rudman’s death last year, he surprised the Met with a gift that included three works by Caccia, whose art is rarely represented in US museum collections—or even outside of the convent in Moncalvo, Italy, where she lived and worked.
“I knew next to nothing about her when the gift came to us,” David Pullins, the Met’s associate curator in the department of European painting, told Artnet News. “Obviously, it’s extremely exciting.”
Caccia’s father, Guglielmo Caccia, trained her as an artist and she went on to use her work to support her religious community. A convent was constructed as an extension of the family home and painting became an important part of its income.
Orsola Maddalena Caccia, Flowers in a Grotesque Vase (c. 1635). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Errol M. Rudman.

Caccia’s work made something of a splash last May when a still life of birds set a record auction result of £212,500 ($264,350)—more than 14 times the pre-sale estimate. Nevertheless, the artist wasn’t exactly high on the Met’s shopping list, “because of the rarity of the works and the difficulty of attributing those work that do come on the market,” Pullins explained.
But her work falls in line with the Met’s goals to expand its holdings both of works by women artists and of still life paintings. The three donated pieces include two still lifes and one religious scene, as first reported by Art Herstory.
Orsola Maddalena Caccia, Still life of birds, including a marsh tit, chiffchaff, chaffinch, blue tits, goldrest, lapwing and a great tit. Courtesy of Sotheby’s London.

“The Redmond collection is really evidence of a focused kind of collecting that may not be in the multi-million-dollar category, but can absolutely help fill out the story of European painting,” Pullins said.
The two Caccia still lifes made their public debut at the Met in December. They are currently on view in “A New Look at Old Masters,” the newly reinstalled European paintings galleries at the top of the museum’s grand staircase.
Installation view of “A New Look at Old Masters” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This condensed presentation of works from the Met’s Old Master collection unveils the results of the first phase of a project to improve the museum’s natural lighting, and features Caccia—along with Bartolomeo Cavarozzi’s Basket of Fruit (1620), also donated by Rudman—on a wall dedicated to 17th-century still lifes.
Adding Caccia’s work to the display “helps to highlight the acquisition last year of a floral still life by Clara Peeters, a Flemish woman—a beautiful work, but intensely painted in a very different way,” Pullins said.
The two Caccia paintings are “textbook examples of her work,” he added. “Flowers in a Grotesque Vase is everything that she does—this very meticulous individuation, treating each strand of flowers independently. It results in this very graphic abstract reduction of form. That is part of the reason that her work appeals to a contemporary aesthetic.”
Clara Peeters, A Bouquet of Flowers (c. 1612). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace, Howard S. and Nancy Marks, Friends of European Paintings, and Mr. and Mrs. J. Tomilson Hill Gifts, Gift of Humanities Fund Inc., by exchange, Henry and Lucy Moses Fund Inc. Gift, and funds from various donors.

Still life, of course, was historically one of the more common genres for early women painters, who were typically denied access to live models and formal training alongside male students. Scholars now believe that, like many other women artists of the era, Caccia has had a significant number of her works misattributed to men—which partially accounts for their rarity.
That includes the Met’s third Caccia work, Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist (c. 1625), previously thought to be the work of her father. Part of the confusion stems from the fact that “she was probably reusing drawings and designs by her father for the figures,” Pullins said. But the painting’s many still life elements, especially the goldfinch and the profusion of flowers—Caccia’s trademark—point compellingly to her hand.
Orsola Maddalena Caccia, Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist (c. 1625). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Errol M. Rudman.

Despite the relatively small number of known paintings by Caccia, the artist’s work is relatively well-documented compared to that of some of her female contemporaries—even within the Moncalvo convent.
Art historians have found that two sisters, for instance, were allowed to enter religious life with a reduced dowery “because they were sufficiently talented in painting and it looked like they would help the income of the convent,” Pullins said.
“There are a number of artists in the period where we know that a daughter or a sister was a painter. We know it archivally, but it’s very hard—if not impossible—to attribute works to them,” he added, citing Caccia’s contemporary Lucrina Fetti, a nun and sister of artist Domenico Fetti, for whom no known works have been definitively identified.
As the art world looks to uncover the careers and artistic output of these forgotten female Old Masters, the surge of interest in their work has led to a shift in the art market. Pop star and fashion designer Victoria Beckham has even been helping Sotheby’s promote the category at auction.
Now, Caccia’s canvases may be the most significant of the Rudman bequest, rather than a small-scale copper work The Flight Into Egypt (c. 1664) by Carlo Maratta. “Twenty years ago, the Carlo Maratta would have been the knock out. He was a very important Baroque artist working in Rome, and we had no works by him,” Pullins said.
Today, works by early women painters are among the most sought after by the Met, which is looking to continue building on a foundation that includes one work by Margaretha Haverman (c.1693–c. 1739), one by Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1652), a pair of pastels by Rosalba Carriera (1673–1757), at least three Luisa Roldán (1652–1706) sculptures, and a newly attributed Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614).
When it comes to Old Master donations now, “marketwise,” Pullins said, “one would much prefer it be by a woman.”
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The artist Emma Amos died in May, at age 83, from complications of Alzheimer’s Disease. But even as her illness progressed, the painter, printmaker, and weaver was sustained by the knowledge that her seven-decade career was finally on the brink of her first retrospective, “Color Odyssey” at the Georgia Museum of Art.
“Emma always knew that she was going to have a show with me—she might not have remembered my name at the last, but she knew that I was organizing an exhibition,” Shawnya Harris, the museum’s curator of African American and African diasporic art, told Artnet News. “That really touched me.”
A pioneering African American artist, educator, and activist born in Atlanta, Georgia, Amos studied visual art at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and London’s Central School of Art, before getting her master’s in art education at New York University.
It was there that her professor and mentor, Hale Woodruff, invited her to join the short-lived yet groundbreaking Black art collective Spiral, alongside the likes of Romare Bearden and Charles Alston. Amos was its youngest member and the only woman. As an artist dedicated to making work that spoke to the experiences of Black women, Amos went on to join the feminist collectives Heresies and the Guerrilla Girls.
Emma Amos, Equals (1992). Courtesy of a private collection.

“Her involvement with these groups show the conviction she had not just as an artist but also as a person who wanted to fight for injustice,” Jeffrey Lee, of New York’s Ryan Lee Gallery, told Artnet News in an email.
“There are so many aspects to Emma,” Harris added. “She was entangled with some really formative parts of the art-historical narrative, around feminism, around Civil Rights, around Pattern and Decoration.”
The curator met Amos in 2009, and was immediately interested in organizing an exhibition. When Harris joined the Georgia Art Museum in 2015, Amos was near the top of her wish list for shows, both because she was a local artist and by virtue of her work, which addresses issues such as race, class, gender, and privilege in figurative mixed-media paintings that combine lithography, intaglio, collage, and laser transfer.
“The way she depicted the human form and the process of mixing painting and fabric by introducing an element of craft all resonate today,” Lee said.
Emma Amos, Have Faith (1991). Courtesy of the collection of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University; acquired through the Truman W. Eustis III, Class of 1951, Fund, and through the generosity of the Class of 1951, 2017. Image courtesy of the Johnson Museum.

But despite her prolific, multifaceted career, Amos—like so many Black women artists—remained largely unrecognized  for much of her career.
Her last solo museum show wrapped up its tour at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1995, and it has only been in recent years that Amos began appearing in important traveling group shows, such as “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” originating at the Tate Modern in London, and “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965–1985,” organized by the Brooklyn Museum. Both were in 2017.
“It just has taken longer to get women and artists of color into the forefront,” Harris said. “It’s a very phallocentric art world.”
It was an issue that Amos addressed herself in an artist statement that proclaimed, “yes, race, sex, class, and power privileges exist in the world of art.”
Emma Amos, X-Flag (1992). Courtesy of a private collection.

“In some of her writings,” Harris said, “Amos talks about not being able to be a part of the literature or the criticism of art. It hampers the development of women artists’ careers if nobody’s writing about them.”
In giving Amos the spotlight she has long deserved, the Georgia Museum has brought together more than 60 of the artists’ works, from all stages of her career.
Seeing it all laid out chronologically, the viewer will realize how, early on, Amos began incorporating the African textiles and other fabrics that characterize her later work, and how her use of color remains a through line as she moves from the abstract works of her Spiral period to figurative compositions.
“She used color from a political standpoint to make statements about social relationships and culture,” Harris said. “There is no one representation that embodies all of Blackness or anything else. That’s why you see all these women with multicolored body parts in her work.”
Emma Amos, Does Black Rub Off? (1992). Courtesy of the Morris Museum of Art, Georgia.

“It’s always been my contention,” Amos once said, “that for me, a Black woman artist, to walk into the studio is a political act.”
“Emma was concerned about her legacy,” Lee said. “Now, we can rest assured her legacy will continue on forever. She is part of art history and the canon, and is being recognized for all that she did during her lifetime.”
See more works from the show below.
Emma Amos, 3 Ladies (1970). Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, purchased with the John D. McIlhenny Fund, 2019.

Emma Amos, Creatures of the Night (1985). Collection of the Amos family, courtesy Ryan Lee Gallery, New York.

Emma Amos, Creatures of the Night (1985). Collection of the Amos family, courtesy Ryan Lee Gallery, New York.

Emma Amos, Streaks (1983). Courtesy of a private collection.

Emma Amos, Identity (2006). Collection of the Amos family, courtesy Ryan Lee Gallery, New York.

Emma Amos, Take One (1985–87). Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art; gift of Sylvan Cole, in memory of Lillyan Cole.

Emma Amos, Sandy and Her Husband (1973). Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art; John L. Severance Fund, 2018.

Emma Amos, Tightrope (1994). Courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Art gift of funds from Mary and Bob Mersky and the Ted and Dr. Roberta Mann Foundation Endowment Fund.

Emma Amos, Seated Figure and Nude (1966). Courtesy of the Emanuel Family Collection.

Emma Amos, American Girl (1974). Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 2018.

“Emma Amos: Color Odyssey” is on view at the Georgia Museum of Art, 90 Carlton Street, Athens, Georgia, January 30—April 25, 2021. It will travel to the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, 310 Genesee Street, Utica, New York, June 19–September 12, 2021; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 9, 2021–January 2, 2022.

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For the artist Abigail DeVille, watching Black Lives Matter marches over the past summer was pivotal. She recalls the throngs of protesters, arms linked, eyes staring straight amid a full on pandemic.
Those images, seared in her memory, prompted the creation of her sculpture, Light of Freedom (2020), commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy and installed in the Manhattan-based park. The work takes the ubiquitous image of Lady Liberty’s torch and infuses it with contemporary symbolism. The work incorporates scaffolding as a sort of golden cage, in which a torch is suspended. The fiery blue flames of the object are in fact entwined mannequin arms pointing into the distance.
In an exclusive interview with Art21 as part of the “Extended Play” series, the artist spoke about her influences, and the symbolism embedded in the work.
A native New Yorker whose work reflects on the city’s history, DeVille used scaffolding both for its ubiquity in New York and for what it represents.
“Things have always been constructed and torn down,” she says. “This idea of freedom is under continual construction—and reconstruction—from generation to generation.” 
Deville was inspired by an elementary school teacher who introduced her to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which she said “planted a seed, for sure, of thinking about how we’re all participants within history.”

Installation view, Abigail DeVille’s Light of Freedom (2020). Photo: Andy Romer Photography. Courtesy of the Madison Square Park Conservancy.

The artist references a 19th-century image she saw in which the hand and torch of the Statue of Liberty were on display in Madison Square Park in a fundraising effort to build its pedestal.
“Society has tried to separate us or define us by our bodies,” DeVille says. But the sculpture and its interlocking limbs are a symbol of the power of joining together “collectively… [to] assert something else.” 
Light of Freedom (2020) will travel to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, in March, and to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, in October.
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series Extended Play, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. 
[embedded content]
This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org

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The group’s latest artwork is a streamable, crowdsourced project featuring hundreds of colorful blooms.
The post Does Instagram Stress You Out? Experience-Art Collective teamLab Has Made a Flowers-Only Alternative Designed to Delight appeared first on artnet News. More