Recent Acquisitions from The Ringling Photography Collection
by Robin O’Dell
“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly.” ― Laura Mulvey, Visual And Other Pleasures
The above quote was written in the 1970s by the noted film theorist Laura Mulvey (British, b. 1941). This idea of the “male gaze” was expanded to include all visual theories and spurred a re-evaluation of how and by whom images have been and are being made of women. Chris Jones, Curator of Photography and New Media, has culled eighteen photographs recently brought into the collection of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art and placed them sparingly on the walls, inviting visitors into this continuing dialogue. Small in number but large in visual delight, these photographs celebrate artists taking control of their own artistic identities.
Artists using self-portraiture include Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972). A transgender artist, Muholi uses their own image to project strength and directness, challenging the very idea of how people of color have been depicted throughout history. Muholi considers themselves a visual activist and is specifically concerned with presenting gay and LBGTQ as part of the photographic canon. In these self-portraits, Muholi’s skin is darkened to an almost pure black and the prints are large, offering a visually dramatic and physically compelling visage. Muholi’s work is immediately recognizable and wholly unforgettable.
Bea Nettles (American, born 1946) is respected for her use of experimental processes. For The Ringling, she created an image that incorporates photographs of the Museum’s environment with one of her own body to make a unique portrait. These fragments combine to layer time and place with her own distinct sense of self. The photograph is part of the series Return Trips including images of Spain and Morocco, so recognizing something so specific to this Museum offers an unexpected delight. The Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, is currently presenting a virtual retrospective of Nettles’ fifty-year career. You can access it here: https://www.eastman.org/bea-nettles-harvest-memory. It provides a good overview of this very creative and inventive artist.
In the photograph Self-Portrait with Leica twentieth-century photographer Ilse Bing (American, born Germany, 1899-1998) captures herself in the act of photographing. Using multiple mirrors, she plays with the idea of self and identity. The image shows both a frontal and side view of the artist while incorporating the Leica camera she became closely associated with. This small camera was revolutionary at the time, as most professional photographers still used box or cameras with bellows. This iconic photograph is part of a large gift of over a thousand photographs given to The Ringling by Stanton and Nancy Kaplan in 2019. Other gifts by the Kaplans in the exhibition include works by Ruth Bernhard (American, born Germany, 1905-2006) and Lotte Jacobi (American, born Prussia, 1896-1990). All three of these twentieth-century artists included in the exhibition were able to carve out noted careers, despite facing limited opportunities due to their gender. Women have actively participated in photography since its inception, yet when the history of photography was first written it was primarily male artists who filled the pages. Like in so much of Western society, women have had to steadily chip away at these constructs, often having to make their own opportunities. The bold images here testify to these artists’ skills. Bernhard, specifically, presents the female body in her own distinctive style, and Jones has selected some lesser-known, while still visually compelling, images.
The exhibition also offers some fascinating portraiture, which the Museum has purchased in the last couple of years, having made an effort to acquire photography by a variety of contemporary women artists. In her series Am I What You’re Looking For? Endia Beal (American, born 1985) takes young black women who are transitioning from college to the workplace and poses them in their own home, but in front of a generic workplace backdrop. These young women stand dressed in their workplace finest, staring into the camera with aplomb. The very act of presenting young black women within the construct of a traditionally male-dominated workplace environment heightens the understanding of how the societal norms we take for granted can be culturally biased. Likewise, Deanna Lawson (American, born 1979) carefully poses a tableau of young lovers fully clothed and embracing within a bedroom. This representation particularly elicits comparisons to the “male gaze,” as Lawson empowers the young black woman to control her own sexuality. You would think that the photograph is a spontaneous snapshot, but Lawson carefully constructs her images to intensify the overall effect. Knowing this invites the viewer to look at every detail for clues to the visual story.
Three photographs are presented from Rania Matar’s (Lebanese, born 1964) series A Girl and Her Room. Matar photographs young women in their bedrooms surrounded by the trappings of adolescence. The locations vary from Beirut, Lebanon to Winchester, Massachusetts. Seeing how each girl has dressed and decorated her room gives an almost voyeuristic glimpse into how she is materially shaping her identity. It brings to mind Sally Mann’s series At Twelve, Portraits of Young Women, not because of any visual similarity (Matar’s pictures are color and large scale), but because they also illuminate the awkward transition from child to adult, teetering on the edge of full womanhood. Matar captures the importance of the outer world to inform the inner.
Selina Román (American, b. 1978) is a Florida artist. In her series Please Disturb, she invites friends and colleagues to visit her in traditional roadside motels and participate in the creative process through the use of props and costume. In the photograph chosen for this exhibition, Solar Flare II, the glare of sunlight obscures the face of the subject. Román uses this anonymity as a force of power. “I can see you, but you can’t see me–so you don’t know what I am thinking or feeling,” she is quoted as saying in the label. As a faceless woman, you are no longer being judged by traditional standards of beauty. That, alone, is empowering.
A trip to The Ringling Museum is always a delight. And where else in the Tampa Bay area are you going to see wall-sized sensual Baroque paintings by Peter Paul Rubens (Dutch 1577-1640) in one gallery and then experience the penetrating stare of Zanele Muholi in another? And if you have enjoyed looking at women claiming their power, the exhibition Circus and Suffragists is also currently showing at The Ringling Circus Museum through February 14, 2021, and Reframed is currently on view at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts through the end of the year.
Robin O’Dell is the former Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and is currently the Curator of Collections at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Tampa. In addition to curating dozens of photography exhibitions, she has written for Image Magazine, George Eastman Museum, and the Arts Coast Journal for Creative Pinellas.
Derrick Adams: Buoyant is on its last tour stop at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg through November 29, 2020. The exhibition was initially conceived by the Hudson Valley Museum and curated by James E. Bartlett, founder of Open Art and former Executive Director of the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, in Brooklyn, and Laura Vookles, Chair of the Hudson River Museum’s Curatorial Department.
Installation view of Derick Adams: Buoyant. Photo: Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.
On entering, the exhibition may strike a viewer as many things: joyful, fun, playful, enticing, or whimsical. The twelve large-scale paintings in the exhibition are an explosion of neon and novelty. Radical may not be the first word that comes to mind upon visiting the exhibition when the subject matter, groups of people and individuals relaxing on novelty pool floats, is so patently ordinary.
The Floaters series was created over a span of three years (2016-2019). This is a rare opportunity to see works on loan from private collections, and to see some of the Floaters together as a group, which creates a much different feeling than would seeing any one on its own. Walking into the gallery is walking into a space occupied by paintings of African Americans. Part of the impact of the exhibition is that it highlights how rarely we see representations—in art or popular media—of Black people simply existing. This everyday reality of Black life in America suffers from erasure by omission.
Floater 66, 2018, Acrylic paint and collage on paper, Collection of D. Rebecca Davies and Jeremy Kramer. Photo: Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.
In relation to the picture planes of all of the Floaters, the viewer is left rather floating themselves. With the exception of one, the backgrounds of the paintings are one solid shade of blue (one painting has a darker blue at the top that seems to denote the difference between sky and water, the only horizon line in the gallery). The paintings are acrylic on paper, so there are ripples in the paper most noticeable in the blue background as the paper absorbed the paint and dried. The ripples and the occasional variations in the blue field—not a different color, but from more or less paint on the brush—enhance the suggestion of water and gentle motion.
Figures are anchored to their novelty pool floats, but beyond that there are no clues to what kind of space they occupy, other than that it’s water. Without a horizon line, the viewer is left in an uncertain space. Some of the figures are looking out of their space, making eye contact with viewers while many others are engaged with other figures or are simply looking elsewhere.
Installation view of Derick Adams: Buoyant. Photo: Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.
The swimsuits of each figure are collage elements of different fabric, adding another visual flourish to the already dazzling paintings.
In an interview with Charles Moore for artnet news that I’ll refer to several times, Derrick Adams uses the phrase “Black radical imagination” which, as he sees it, can be a tool to create the future. It is worth exploring this idea so we can fully appreciate how radical these day-glo spaces inhabited by patchwork figures are.
Representation reflects and creates reality. We have seen this thought repeated a lot over the last decade or so—representation matters. Everyone wants to be able to see themselves and their possibilities reflected in the popular media they consume. When Adams conceived the Floaters series in 2015, he searched Instagram for #floaties and the algorithm returned only pictures of white people. In this instance, the representation failed to align with the reality that he had experienced.
Digital Reproduction from Ebony, June 1967. Installation view of Derick Adams: Buoyant. Photo: Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.
In further research, Adams found inspiration in anEbony feature from June 1967 of Coretta and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on a tropical escape to Ocho Rios, Jamaica (also included in the exhibition). While the article makes clear that this is not a vacation (King wanted a month in a place without a phone to write his book Where Do We Go from Here?), the photo essay is almost exclusively comprised of images showing Dr. King at rest: walking on the beach, relaxing in the pool, having breakfast on the balcony in his robe and slippers, reading the newspaper in bed. This fascinating editorial shows a seldom-seen side of Dr. King, but also shows what is necessary to fuel his public acts in the struggle for equal civil rights: rest, quiet, isolation, time to think and to put thoughts in order. Time and space to just exist.
It’s worth quoting Adams at length because his intent with the Floaters series was to depict Black people at rest, similar to how Dr. King had been photographed for Ebony.
Floater 74. Installation view of Derick Adams: Buoyant. Photo: Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.
“What I love the most is when I’m at an event or a party at someone’s house and I look around and everyone in the room is doing something. It’s all Black people doing all these amazing things and I’m like, wow, this is great. And I say to myself, this is what we should be making work about, this type of atmosphere. Young Black people should see that there are very normal, very consistent spaces like these—regardless of what’s happening in the news, regardless of what’s happening on social media. With all the conflicts that we’re having, we’re still finding the time. And not everyone in this room has money! These aren’t people who are all well off!
That’s what I’m thinking about in my studio: What can I reveal that has not been shown? And it always goes back to the simplest of things, like normalcy. Black people—not entertaining, just being, living. Letting people deal with that as reality. We’re sitting on this pool float. We’re thinking about life. We’re thinking about nothing. We don’t have to think about something every day. It’s a real human experience not to ponder on things constantly.”
The paintings that resonated most with me were both paintings of women. I’ll describe them but they’re not reproduced here, so you’ll have to go to the exhibition to see them for yourself.
Floater #28 depicts a woman on a white unicorn float. Her bathing suit is neon animal print with hearts and stars, like a Lisa Frank notebook. She looks out of her space and is smiling. Though the blue fields that the figures float on often have the effect of suggesting water through the variations in paint application, most of the geometric planes that comprise the figures are more even in tone—less painterly, more hard-edge. This figure is different. The paint application on her legs and abdomen create a variation in tone within the planes that most of the other figures don’t exhibit. It’s like seeing the natural variation in skin tone across different parts of someone’s body. Adams has also employed the grey-tone paint—usually reserved for the parts of the figures bodies that are underwater—on the figure’s arm and face that couldn’t be the only part under the water if the rest of her is not. It’s the kind of variation that feels like improvisation on the theme. It’s just different enough to have made me stop and look a lot more closely.
Representations like Floaters reflect one reality experienced by Black folks in America, one that aligns with the experience of love, community, family, and just living life. It hints at another reality from the not-so-distant past—the reality that all-Black spaces were backed by apartheid laws and violently enforced by police and mercenary groups. Pools and beaches were sites of contestation. Here in St. Petersburg, the beaches downtown were segregated. From Spa Beach north was designated whites only. The beaches for African Americans were South Mole at what is now Demen’s Landing and Lassing Park.
The subject matter of the paintings contain the tension of present and past, even while Adams is trying to create a future where celebrations of everyday Black life are more commonplace.
We see Black lives snuffed out on live Facebook broadcasts. We see representations of Black Americans working, struggling, mourning. We see them relative to the white supremacist political and economic system that their kidnapped ancestors were forced to build, and that largely controls what type of images are disseminated in the public sphere. It is rare to see representations of Black people resting. Images of Black bodies at rest are radical.
Installation view of Derick Adams: Buoyant. Photo: Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.
Floater #17 portrays a pregnant woman lounging on a hot pink float. I imagine the buoyancy of her body, with or without the float, is a welcome relief from gravity’s pull on the extra bulk of her body carrying a baby. Black women experience overlapping oppression of misogyny and racism, represented by the term misogynoir. As a class, they have always been expected to work (when white women may have been homemakers, Black women may have been their maids or nannies) and have had the highest labor force participation among all women for years. The United States has a dark history of sterilizing Black women without their consent throughout the 20th century. Yet look back earlier, when African Americans were enslaved and performing forced labor, and Black women’s bodies were commodities that grew the labor force.
Artists are worldbuilders. By making these paintings, Adams populates our world with many more images of Black leisure. Adams realizes the power of the artist to create reality—to create the world in images so that later people can create it through action. If you want an action to succeed, you have to be able to imagine it has happened, and then imagine what happens next. Adams invites viewers to co-create a future where images like this aren’t “positive” in comparison to other pictures, where all aspects of Black life aren’t adjunct to their white counterparts, presented as the default.
The term radical seems to be used with such frequency that the impact of the word has faded. From radical feminism to radical self-care, radical honesty to the radical left, radical is just as often used by Instagram influencers to sell protein powder as in any political reformist sense. We live in a radical-saturated world. Invoking Black radical imagination asks for a rethinking of all assumptions about Black life in America, from the roots up. Ask why things are the way they are and why they seem unchangeable. And then imagine what systems need to be torn down to their foundations and rebuilt differently. In 2020 conversations about prison abolition have entered mainstream political discourse. This is radical imagination at work.
As I’m writing this review, the verdict in Louisville has just come in. Nobody is going to be criminally charged for Breonna Taylor’s murder, though one officer is being charged for endangering the lives of her white neighbors. I’m thinking about Breonna who was not only at home, but was sleeping, literally at rest, when she was killed. Imagine if this had had a different outcome. Imagine what needs to be torn down and rebuilt to ensure future Black lives are valued and protected. I’m also thinking how even though Adams’ intent was to show Black joy and play and people just existing, it seems that there is no neutral in the representation of African Americans. It becomes political as soon as it enters the public because Black people just existing is a radical and revolutionary act. Unless we are part of the communities that Adams is talking about, we may not see the experience that he’s talking about. Black people just living, just being. Black figures at rest. Black people not othered by the implicit or explicit comparison to whiteness. Being in the gallery with so many Floaters makes me wonder if it’s a pool, how enormous the pool must be to hold the figures, the floats, and to still not see the horizon. Are we floating with them? Part of the party? Or interlopers?
Related Exhibition Programming
PANEL DISCUSSION: AFRICAN AMERICAN LEISURE IN THE SUNSHINE STATE & BEYOND WITH DERRICK ADAMS October 15, 2020, 6:30-8 pm Free for members, and $10 for not-yet-members. An online conversation featuring Derrick Adams, Dr. Gretchen Sorin, author of Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights, and Cynthia Wilson-Graham, co-author of Remembering Paradise Park: Tourism and Segregation in Silver Springs. The discussion will be moderated by MFA Curator of Contemporary Art Katherine Pill.
BLACK FANTASTIC, BUOYANT AND BOLD: ART’S WAYS OF LEVITATING OVER THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD WITH AUTHOR TENEA D. JOHNSON October 22, 2020, 6-7 pm Free for members, and $10 for not-yet-members Author Tenea D. Johnson will read joy-centered selections from her latest book, Blueprints for Better Worlds (May 2020)as well as the forthcoming collection, Broken Fevers.
POETRY AND SPOKEN WORD WITH DENZEL JOHNSON-GREEN October 25, 2020, 3-4 pm Free for members, and $20 for not-yet-members. Join poet and author Denzel Johnson-Green in the time-honored tradition of utilizing spoken word and poetry to both raise awareness of, and develop mechanisms for addressing, the world around us.
About the author: Bay Art Files contributor Sabrina Hughes holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of South Floridawith a focus on the History of Photography. Hughes has worked at the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and is an adjunct instructor at USF and is the founder and principal of photoxo, a personal archiving service specializing in helping people preserve their family photos. She has an ongoing curatorial project, Picurious, which invests abandoned slides with new life. Follow her on Instagram @sabrinahughes for selfies, hiking, and dogs, and @thepicurious for vintage photos.
jenal, 2019. Acrylic, oil, coffee grounds, enamel, on board, foamular frame, 50 x 50 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Jenal Dolson is a nervous flyer even under normal circumstances. Add scrambling to get out of the country during a global pandemic before international borders close and anyone’s stress levels will ascend to new heights. It is Tuesday, March 31st, and she is leaving the United States and returning home to Canada to shelter with her family as the severity of COVID-19 slowly dawns on U.S. citizens. She sits alone in Tampa International Airport, waiting to board a flight that she never expected to be on and saying goodbye to a place she is not ready to leave behind.
To call the last few weeks of Dolson’s time in Tampa a whirlwind would be an understatement. At this point in March, she is a MFA candidate at the University of South Florida, in the thick of her final semester when the coronavirus hits America. Between transitioning her in-person classes to an online platform (no easy feat for studio art courses), finishing her thesis work, writing about said work, preparing for install, and making travel arrangements, change is the constant. Her graduating class’s MFA exhibition Battin’ A Hundred is canceled, their reception is canceled, their panel discussion moderated by artist Kalup Linzy is canceled. It feels like everything is canceled. However, the artists are undeterred, and they still exhibit their work in the USF Contemporary Art Museum. There is almost a defiant pride in displaying their art knowing that it will not be seen in person.
Dolson spends her precious final hours in Tampa packing for her flight and installing her work in the CAM, with the invaluable assistance of museum staff Vincent Kral, Eric Jonas, and Tony Wong Palms. She recalls visiting the museum for the first time on a 2014 trip to Tampa and sensing then that she would one day show work in this space, a premonition fulfilled these six years later.
Bump Dream, 2020. Acrylic, latex, oil on canvas, 72 x 72 inches. From the MFA thesis exhibition. Image taken by Jezabeth Roca Gonzalez.Soother, 2020. Acrylic, oil, fabric, foamular, on MDF, 50 x 50 inches. From the MFA thesis exhibition. Image taken by Jezabeth Roca Gonzalez. Whale, 2020. Acrylic, oil, foamular, on panel, 50 x 50 inches. From the MFA thesis exhibition. Image taken by Jezabeth Roca Gonzalez.
Her arrival in Toronto is not met with a warm embrace from Dolson’s parents, who are relieved to see their daughter home safe but still respecting the social distancing rules that now measure our lives. Everyone dons their face masks and Dolson sits in her parents’ backseat on the car ride from the Toronto airport to their family home outside of Cambridge, Ontario, taking these moments to let a wave of quiet calm wash over her and finally exhale. She is deeply grateful to her parents for hosting her, knowing that in doing so they have committed to the country’s mandatory 14 day returning traveler quarantine alongside her.
Dolson uses the next few days to reacclimate to these surroundings, the familiarity of place comforting her during an unfamiliar time. She self-isolates in a section of her family’s basement, with her beloved chihuahua Bam Bam to keep her company and a mini-fridge stocked with snacks to keep her fed, courtesy of mom. That Friday she joins a Zoom reception hosted by CAM for the MFA exhibition, which has a great turnout as many people are eager to see the artists’ work and congratulate them. Dolson later passes the two-week quarantine mark on the same day that she passes her thesis defense, and her reward for this tremendous accomplishment is finally being able to hug her parents.
Into the Belly, 2020. Coloured pencil, watercolour pencil, gesso, on board, 8.75 x 8.75 x 0.6 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
A welcome focus for Dolson’s energy comes in the form of creating a solo exhibition entitled Into the Belly for Tempus Projects, highlighted on the non-profit gallery’s Instagram account. The show, which ran from May 30th-June 12th, neatly aligns with the Tampa-based gallery’s approach to the pandemic’s unique challenges. Tempus is utilizing social media to showcase a series of mini-virtual exhibits that feature works on a small, intimate scale. As Tempus Founder and Programming Director Tracy Midulla explains, “We have taken the approach of offering small, short virtual exhibitions. This allows us to keep the quality of the work featured at a high standard, but the format and delivery of the works to a manageable level for everyone as we are distanced from one another.”
Installation view of Into the Belly in a section of Dolson’s converted basement space. Image courtesy of the artist.
Into the Belly consists of eight coloured pencil drawings on gessoed board, with each work’s dimensions around 5×6 or 7×8 inches. Dolson’s process is reliant on found materials, so she seamlessly adapts to her new circumstances by repurposing leftovers in her old studio in her parents’ house. Her use of coloured pencils on board allows for textures to come out of the surface itself, some areas pulling through the grain of the wood or underlaying brushwork; paired with a uniform attention to colour blocking and gradient fades. These underlaying patterns resemble countless tiny fissures, which further emphasize the material’s surface while adding layers of complexity to already rich compositions.
The Days Eye (Edelweiss), 2020. Coloured pencil, watercolour pencil, gesso, on board, 8.75 x 4.8 x 0.6 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
The small scale of each work is in keeping with the gallery’s current theme of miniature exhibitions. Dolson also expresses her interest in scaling down the works to a size that is accessible, where they can be held in your hand and you can take them with you very easily. Although these new images are much smaller than her thesis paintings, she draws several parallels between the two bodies of work. Dolson clarifies that the viewer is still looking at a series of shapes, forms, lines, directions, and pathways, which you can follow around the work finding little areas where something new can be seen.
Bathhouse, 2020. Coloured pencil, watercolour pencil, gesso, on board, 5.8 x 4.8 x 0.75 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
There is plenty to see in Dolson’s drawings, so much that you might get lost in looking. The artist presents the viewer with a plethora of shapes and motifs to latch onto and alluring pathways through each labyrinth. One might glance at a piece like Bathhouse and seize upon the chain in the lower right of the composition as a good entry point. If you follow this chain directly upwards, it becomes veiled by a light blue rectangular shape that hints of cloth or drapery. If you choose a different approach and start from top to bottom, does the chain then become unveiled? Other areas may suggest something recognizable while leaving you grasping to articulate this familiarity.
Into the Belly is an apt title, as Dolson equates our current COVID-19 reality with entering the belly of the whale or belly of the beast. As levels of infection fluctuate worldwide and we find ourselves months into isolation with no clear end in sight, she muses “it is hard to say if we are on the other side yet, are we still inside of it completely, or can we see the light? There is a lot of emotion in this time that is kind of unpredictable and everyone’s pace of life has changed dramatically. It is not only a metaphor, but it is allegorical of how everyone has been forced into this journey.”
The title also attaches us to the body, to be within a living thing, which she connects to the physical referents that a lot of the shapes and forms take on in her work. The tempest of emotions and anxieties we feel manifest physically in our bodies, and the pandemic makes us hypersensitive to these sensations. We continually self-monitor for the first signs of fever, the slightest cough, and to make sure we have not lost our sense of smell or taste. As Dolson succinctly puts it, “our emotions in our bodies are really in our guts.”
Insulation (viewfinder), 2020. Coloured pencil, watercolour pencil, gesso, on board, 5.8 x 4.8 x 0.6 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Dolson is appreciative of Tempus for giving her a platform to explore new ideas post thesis, amidst the pandemic. She explains that the timing was especially beneficial, as it “really gave me a lot of purpose during the first month and a half that I was back. I was able to come home and put in work drawing 8-10 hours a day and that was absolutely amazing. I think Tempus has a strong sense of what it means to be an art space in that they truly value their artists and look to foster a sense of creativity and programming that makes sense for who they are affiliated with.”
Proceeds from Dolson’s show will go towards helping Tempus fundraise for a paid full-time director position for the gallery. Dolson is also donating a portion of the proceeds from future sales to Black Lives Matter Tampa.
What is next for Jenal Dolson? “Making more work” is her immediate, unflinching answer. Dolson is making a new series of paintings on canvas and she looks forward to waking up each morning and having her studio time. She relishes the daily grind of making work, embodying that true artist-as-hustler mentality, where the balancing act of juggling multiple jobs and projects only energizes her to seek more.
In terms of future exhibitions, Dolson is thrilled to have a solo show this fall at an artist-run space in Benson, Nebraska called The Pet Shop, and she beams when discussing the opportunity. Her close friend Kim Darling, currently a MFA candidate at USF, ran a space at the gallery and helped Dolson make connections in Benson. Dolson also remains in good virtual company through regular studio visits with friends and a gallery in Chicago with which she is enamored. Finally, it has been only days since Dolson moved into an apartment in the port city of Hamilton, Ontario. The industrious city’s “steel town” identity matches her own tenacious work ethic. She is drawn to the city’s strong local arts scene, where she can make her marks on the community. There is also a lovely blend of nature and rich architectural history that she is wasting no time in exploring. Dolson is eager to create her place in this new environment, and everywhere she looks she absorbs new lines, new shapes, new textures, new patterns, and new objects, searching for another source of inspiration around every corner.
Dolson in her Tampa studio with Bam Bam. Image taken by Kim Darling.
James Cartwright earned his M.A. in Art History from USF in 2017. He focuses on cross-cultural exchanges in art production, while occasionally wandering into the realm of contemporary art criticism. He is an adjunct Art History instructor at USF and the University of Tampa, where he uses his liberal arts background to corrupt the impressionable youth of America.
“My engagement with art has something to do with [its] mystery, a continuous exploration of how it is put together.” Christian Viveros-Fauné
Christian Viveros-Fauné is an internationally respected independent art critic and curator. His appointment as Curator-at-Large to the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum (USFCAM) in August of 2018 launched a series of politically and socially engaged exhibitions that have further linked Tampa Bay to current trends in the global art world.
Interview conducted and transcribed by Amanda Poss in May of 2019.
Amanda Poss: I was reading your new book Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art, and in the introduction you cite a trip to the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. when you were twelve where you saw four Rothko paintings. You said this experience was something that “energized” you, and that the paintings “lodged themselves deep into [your] memory.” With this as your catalyst into art appreciation as a child, would you also describe your initial steps into the art world as a professional?
Christian Viveros-Fauné: Those were my initial steps as recounted in the introduction, which reads in part as a portrait of the critic as a young man. At some point I figured out that there was this thing that was mysterious to me–and that actually remains mysterious to me, simply because I can’t make [art], I can’t do it. You know there are people who can’t dance and you say “they have two left feet,” well, I can’t draw, I can’t paint, I can’t do either because I have two left hands so to speak, so I write. My engagement with art has something to do with [its] mystery; it’s a continuous exploration of how art is materially put together, how pigment is pushed around cloth, for instance, to make a picture. That has always seemed to be, to me, kind of miraculous.
I had another experience in my early twenties, when I went to live in Europe. I was always a writer, or a writer wannabe…(laughs)…this was definitely during the writer wannabe period… and I figured out that hanging out with artists was a lot more interesting than hanging out with writers. Writers tend to be shut-ins, they spend a lot of time alone. Being a professional writer is a lonely experience, whereas artists have to get out into the world and show their work at least once or twice a year, so art making has always been far more public. Writers, on the other hand, could spend two years, five years, ten years, basically working on the same project…. So, like I said, I found that artists were a lot more interesting to hang out with. Eventually I entered an artist studio, an actual professional artist, someone who got paid for making paintings and exhibiting them, and I remember being floored by the idea that people could push pigment around to make meaning in ways parallel to how I wanted to make meaning with words. That was a real revelation, it has stayed with me, and is a gift that keeps on giving. I find myself continually inspired, surprised, and amazed by individuals who have made a life from making this kind of meaning consistently.
Bosco Sodi, Muro, 2017-2019. USF Contemporary Art Museum. Photo: Will Lytch.
AP: That brings me nicely to my next point: you have a tremendous CV, with a wide array of experiences and accolades. As someone who has done quite a lot of independent writing and curating, what sort of opportunities/possibilities excite you most about working within USFCAM, which is an institutional but also academic setting?
CVF: That’s a really good question. I’ve long had a career as a writer who moonlights as a curator… meaning, I arrive at an institution and put together a show, but I rarely get to do a second exhibition at the same institution. And that independence comes with significant freedoms, but it also has some drawbacks, right? Not only is working independently unsteady work, but being at an institution longer than single exhibition can mean that you make a bigger impact than just one good show…
AP: One moment, as opposed to a successive series of them.
CVF: Exactly! And that’s really the sort of thing that attracted me to the idea of working at USFCAM. Margaret Miller is largely at fault-slash-deserves the credit for bringing me here. The way she proposed the position was very liberating. For me, ultimately, it was largely about being able to do something at an institution that offered significant freedoms conceptually and curatorially, but that also allows for the opportunity to be able to do a series of exhibitions, with the added bonus that the university is the enveloping organization That is, USFCAM operates in an environment geared towards education, rather than making museum trustees happy.
AP: Which is really different.
CVF: Yes, very different! So, yeah, I think it’s turned out to be a really good fit. There’s also the value of doing things on this campus and in Tampa as opposed to in New York. New York is arguably the center of the art world, it has long been the center of money in the art world. A lot of important art is seen in cities like London and New York, and that is obviously significant on its face… [but] there a lot of cultural phenomena that fail to register in New York because there’s not enough money attached to them, and that’s very unfortunate. Ideas that run contrary to the art market tend to do better elsewhere, they tend to take root in places other than New York. In my book I talk about groundbreaking artists like Rick Lowe. He has given plenty of talks in New York but he has never had a show there, he has never participated in the Whitney Biennial, which is insane, seeing as he’s one of the most influential artists living today. Same thing with Theaster Gates. Social practice in general, which is more than a decade old, has gotten very little play in New York and I think that tells you a lot.
Jorge Tacla, Señal de abandono 34 (Homs), 2018. USF Contemporary Art Museum. Photo: Will Lytch.
AP: That brings me to my next point. In an interview you did back in 2016 with Brett Wallace for Conversation Project NYC, you were asked: “What should a great show seek to accomplish?” In your response, you mentioned that art should “illustrate [critically] where art/culture is today,” and that you see this happening more in secondary and tertiary cities around the world, as opposed to New York. Do you still feel that way (it sounds like you do), and do you feel that Tampa could be one of these cities?
CVF: I hope so! Let me answer the second part of your question first: I sincerely hope so, and I know my colleagues at USFCAM hope so. We have made inroads and will continue to make inroads in that direction. I’m not sure Tampa has become a secondary or tertiary cultural hub yet, but I do see green shoots suggesting, given a number of crucial synergies, that such a thing could happen. What I like about Tampa currently is that it presents an environment in which ideas can be profiled anew and redefined, which I personally find to be very appealing.
Miki Kratsman, Displaced (2010) and Bedouin Archive (2015-2016). USF Contemporary Art Museum. Photo by Will Lytch.
AP: Now let’s talk about something a bit broader. What does it mean to you to be a curator?
CVF: I don’t really subscribe to the idea of a curator as an author. That is, I don’t like the situation where the curator supplants the artist as an author. I like to think of the role of the curator as a chief collaborator, someone who helps articulate, who helps put discrete works together, like in a group exhibition. Or, if we’re talking about mounting a solo exhibition, [the curator] helps create the context for the work. Curatorial work is, in part, a function of getting art out of the studio. Many artists work long hours with the doors closed to the outside world. Then the work comes out for exhibitions. In a gallery situation, the dealer, the gallerist, hopefully helps the artist articulate his or her vision. In a museum, it’s the curator who helps in making the symbolic meaning circulate. In those circumstances, the curator functions like an an interlocutor–a chief believer in the work–whom the artist can also talk to and figure out the best cultural angle in which to position his or her art.
(Laughs) That was kind of a wordy and non-specific definition….
AP: That’s perfectly fine! I was curious what it meant to you (specifically), because anyone could cite sort of a textbook definition or current theories but everyone has their own approach.
CVF: Possibly because I am very much a generalist as a writer and curator, I really do think there’s an important aspect of editing and interpreting in curating. At their best, curators act like editors for artists. That’s not to say that the curator is necessarily cutting anything from an artist’s production, but, to continue with the editing metaphor, if you’re putting together a collection of ‘essays’–that is, a collection of artworks–then it’s on the editor/curator to make sure that those artworks play as well together as they possibly can. Whether the ‘editor’ is working with a single artist or a group of artists, it’s his or her obligation to establish a relationship of trust and collaboration wherein the best work comes forward and is represented in the best light possible.
Miki Kratsman, People I Met, 2010–2018 (installation view). USF Contemporary Art Museum. Photo: Will Lytch.
CVF: Let’s see. Both of those exhibitions you just mentioned can be described, in broad strokes, as highly political, to nod definitively towards issues of social engagement. But what we have on tap for the future, well, some exhibitions are more political than others. Work with a social or political bent has always been my interest, but I don’t want to present those kind of shows exclusively. I think that would make for far too uniform an exhibition program, both for the museum and myself as a curator, so there are other things on tap, [which] I’d rather not discuss right this minute… (Laughs)
AP: No hints? (Laughs)
CVF: I don’t necessarily want to give away the the shows that are coming in 2020 or 2021, but what I can tell you is that it will involve an eclectic group of exhibitions. There are going to be several that are a lot more about eye candy [as opposed to] the two shows I’ve done to-date, and even the exhibitions that are heavy on the eye candy will have a significant social component to them. I can say [something] about the next exhibition, which is called The Return of the Real. It’s a two-person show that riffs, or cheekily appropriates, the title from Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real. We’re definitely not using the title in a way that he’d like. (Laughs)
[The exhibition includes] the work of Robert Lazzarini, he makes amazing sculptures that are distorted anamorphically, and another artist who is a generation younger, Rodrigo Valenzuela. Rodrigo is a faculty member at UCLA, [and] a photographer… he’s had about five shows in West Coast museums in the last three years, so he’s well-known out there but not so much on the East Coast. We’re interested in bringing in him [to Tampa] and in being the first institution on the East Coast to showcase his work. Both of these artists are differently committed to amazing acts of re-representation. In both cases, their artworks involve visually stunning, conceptually complex work.
Tavares Strachan, 130,000 Years, 2018. USF Contemporary Art Museum. Photo: Will Lytch.
AP: Let’s talk more about your book, Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art. What were you looking for when selecting 50 exemplar works of political art from last 200 years?
CVF: To be honest with you, and I say this every time I present the book, the selection is pseudo-authoritative and very subjective. I write in the introduction to the book that the volume contains 50 essays on what I consider to be the 50 greatest works of political art. Those 50 artworks will invariably be different from another critic’s 50 great works. We might overlap on 10 or 20 artworks, or at least I would hope so.
What these artworks have in common is that they’re all important in the sense that they have all transformed the notion of what people think about when they think about political art. They’ve all put down a marker, they’ve all expanded the definition of both art and politics. Some of these artworks have done so closer to their date of creation, others have not. I start with [Francisco] Goya’s Disasters of War, which was published posthumously, 35 years after his death. He was way too smart to publish those prints in his lifetime because he would have been nailed to the wall by the Spanish monarchy, and if not by the monarchy, then by the Inquisition. But he still made them… and it took more than a decade to put the plates together. So, you have to ask yourself: why would an artist of his stature, late in life, labor so long to put together those 82 plates? [Goya] is basically taking it all in, he’s considering the war, the state of things, the application of reason to human events, weighing how humans respond to social and economic pressure, and ultimately, what happens to society when things fall apart. And what he witnessed is in those prints. I mean, he wasn’t sitting there taking photographs of the war… but somehow or other, through his own observations and other people’s accounts, Goya arrived at the first modern visual record of war and its human cost: what the poet Robert Burns referred to as ”man’s inhumanity to man.”
AP: Some would say even that all art is political, and you address that question in your introduction, but of course you also had to narrow it down to 50 artworks for the book. What do you wish you could have added in?
CVF: I wish I could have added in another fifty artworks. The initial idea was that the book would include a hundred works of political art. I was told by my publisher that they loved the idea of the book, but that we had to slim it down because reproduction rights are just too expensive… (Laughs) Even the reproduction rights on this little book are crazy, so a hundred wasn’t happening, but, yeah, I wish there were specific works that I could have gotten in there, some of them by contemporary artists whom I admire very much…
David Zwirner Books, Published in 2018
For example, I wanted to include a major work by the Bruce High Quality Foundation. The group ran a free University, BHQFU, for a whole decade. The collective hasn’t disappeared but it has sort of gone underground. That university was very important. It’s only been a year since it was closed, but it was amazing as a social experiment. The Bruces helped shape an entire generation of artists in what is otherwise a very jaded city. There are many others artworks–contemporary, modern, precursors to the modern–that I would have loved to include and simply could not. Richard Mosse, for example: I would have loved to have included images from his Heat Maps series, which are recent photographs that document the refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East using a military-grade infrared camera that is so sophisticated, it is actually considered a weapon of war.
AP: So what excites or intrigues you most about art right now?
CVF: Its possibilities. The fact that [art], today and in every age, actually gets to reimagine what’s possible. I think that’s really what always amazes me [most] about art. It’s got nothing to do with the actual politics of it, whether I might agree with them or not. It has everything to do with the power of the artist to make something amazing from somebody else’s idea of garbage, to turn the seemingly useless into something that has a renewed purpose…. I mean, that basic gesture is just revolutionary, it’s super radical. I find that kind of surprise, that kind of retooling, to be something that only art can do. There’s something special about art’s lack of use value, its seeming uselessness. At its best and most ambitious that uselessness harbors the potential to create laboratory-like insight… the fact that artists can reimagine worlds is immensely powerful.
Karolina Sobecka, A memory, an ideal, a proposition, 2017. USF Contemporary Art Museum. Photo: Will Lytch.
AP: One last question. Can art change the world?
CVF: I think that it can, in small and big ways… it’s not [literally] liberty leading the people, and likely never will be, but art does provide, like [the painting] Liberty Leading the People[by Eugène Delacroix], a rallying point for ideas, and we are a very image driven species. Art can change the world, it has done so in the past–I can count at least 50 instances in which it has–and will continue to do so in the future.
The Return of the Real: Robert Lazzarini and Rodrigo Valenzuela opens at the USF Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa on August 26th and runs through December 7, 2019. The exhibition is curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné, and organized by the USF Contemporary Art Museum.
Artist’s Conversation and Exhibition Reception Friday, September 6, 6-9 pm Conversation in the galleries with artists Robert Lazzarini and Robert Valenzuela, and USFCAM Curator-at-lare Christian Viveros-Fauné. The exhibit reception follows from 7-9pm. Free and open to the public.
For additional information about a symposium, curator’s talk, spoken word and open mic events, and concerts in the gallery throughout the run of the exhibit, visit the USF Contemporary Art Museum’s website.
Amanda Poss received her MA in Art History from the University of South Florida in 2015 specializing in Modern and Contemporary Art, and a BA from the University of Saint Francis, Fort Wayne, Indiana in 2011. Poss currently holds the position of Gallery Director at Gallery221@Hillsborough Community College, Dale Mabry campus, where she also oversees a growing permanent art collection. She is the former Gallery Director at Blake High School, where she organized and curated exhibits from 2015–2017. Poss also has also held positions at the Scarfone/Hartley Gallery at the University of Tampa as a Gallery Assistant, Adjunct Professor at the University of Tampa, and Adjunct Professor at Hillsborough Community College.
