My first food paintings were of eggs. Lots of eggs. Eggs distributed one to a plate, eggs enshrined in stainless steel bowls. I was working out, among other things, my angst-ridden resistance to the cult of motherhood and its reproductive mandate. I had just begun to pilfer 195o’s magazines for imagery, and at the time I was particularly struck by how busy all the ladies pictured in their pages were with countless projects —shining floors, whipping up cakes, contemplating their kitchen cupboards—but really, it all seemed to me to be just a sublimation of the main message: Their true and only purpose in life was to make more tiny Americans. It didn’t seem to me, in the 1990’s, that the message had altered much. It still doesn’t.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On a visit home to Cleveland around this time, I asked Mary Beth, my very brilliant but troubled oldest sister, whether she would be attending the following day’s family Christmas gathering. She replied cryptically, “Of course I’m coming: I’m making . . .deviled eggs.” She slowly drew out the name of the favorite midwestern delicacy, lingering on the “devil”, imbuing it with a  significance I could only guess at. My cousin, an academic who is never at a loss for meaning, pointed out that perhaps here lay, in the humble deviled egg, my next subject matter. Take the egg—embodiment and symbol of the female’s power to create life—remove its core, fluff it up with mayonnaise and reassemble it into a decorative appetizer, a mere warmup to the main event of manly meatitude. The project of the patriarchy in a nutshell. Or eggshell.

I’m Making Deviled Eggs (1999) was something of a break-out painting. It won first prize in a juried show in 2000, which led to my first commercial gallery representation. It was the first time, after working in near-isolation for ten years, that I felt that my art was of interest to a wider world, the first hint that I could have a professional career at it, and maybe even one day make art full time. I had named the painting in an ironic nod to my sister’s cryptic quote. Mary Beth died in 2010 under rather unhappy circumstances. In retrospect, given what a pivotal moment this piece represents, artistically and professionally, I’m happy I did. It feels less ironic and more like an homage to a very smart woman born at the wrong time, whose potential, like that of the deviled eggs, was never fully realized.

I’ve since expanded the menu considerably, but I’m still drawn to those highly decorative concoctions that seem to be channeling an enormous amount of female creativity into bizarre and ephemeral projects. The theme of gutting something, mixing the innards with other ingredients, primarily mayonnaise, and stuffing them back into their original container to create a similacrum of the original—it recurs again and again. (Twice-baked potato, anyone?) It is, come to think of it, also an apt description of what I myself do with the ephemera of the American Dream.

PLEASE JOIN US FOR A CLOSING PARTY AND INDUSTRY NIGHT ON WEDNESDAY, JULY 17 FROM 5-7 PM!

For the sixth year in a row, my colleague Dara Solliday and I will be organizing and curating the 100 under $100 show at ’57 Biscayne. I love doing this. We gather art from a whole bunch of artists we know, and usually a few that we don’t, all of it priced under $100 (as the name would imply) and wrestle it into a surprisingly coherent show. The first year we put  it on, it was kind of thrown together at the last minute (we frantically raided a lot of our neighbors studios to get to 100 pieces) but nevertheless went pretty well. There are collectors from that first event who still come back year after year. We’ve got it down to a system now: The work has to be ready to hang; the artists have to drop it off at prescribed times and enter their own information into a form (I spent several evenings sliding down the hall with my laptop on a chair with casters as Dara fished out post-its and tried to match them to artworks); and we’ve gotten really good at herding a big fat mishmash of art into aestheically pleasing groupings that make their own kind of sense. In other words, it’s a real show now. And until the day we hang it (with some help from other Biscaynitos), we really have no idea what it’s going to look like.

One of the many pleasures of this show is giving some newer artists the opportunity to show their work and actually sell it. However, many established artists look forward to it as well because it’s a chance to do something outside of their known style or medium, to play around a little bit.  We can take risks with something brand-new, or conversely, dig up something old. I’ll be doing the latter this year. I found some oil studies for paintings from the turn of the century—studies that were actually done after the works themselves were in progress. The paintings have long since left my life and gone to good homes, and the studies are like memories of them. They’re also fresher and looser and less precious, from a time before I learned to be loose in my “real” work.

Sleek shiny cars, gleaming ribbons of freeway, convenient modern handheld devices like TV remotes and light meters—we’re all nostalgic for the future that never happened.

My show of recent paintings on vintage fabrics, remixing images of mid-century car ads and real estate porn into dissections of the American unconscious, is up through this Friday, April 26 at Atelier Drome Architecture + Design, 112 Prefontaine Ave. S in Pioneer Square. Hours are 8AM- 5PM Monday through Friday.

Recommended by The Stranger as one of the top shows to see this spring.

I have just finished curating, organizing, and hanging a new show with Annie Brule, artist, book designer, and cartographer extraordinaire. Artists love maps. We invited a bunch of them to create artwork using maps & mapping as a jumping-off point, and they jumped. The result is You Are Here Too, a wide-ranging and totally fun exhibit of paintings, works on paper, assemblage, ceramic bowls, crochet, and embroidery.

It starts at the Good Arts Gallery, inside Cherry Street Coffee House (my downstairs neighbor in the Good Arts Building), and winds upstairs to ’57 Biscayne Studios at 110 Cherry Street on the second and third floors. The show, and the studios, open Thursday May 3, with a big, building-wide open house during Pioneer Square Artwalk. The fun starts at 5 PM; perennial favorite Victor Janusz will serenade us on the piano from 7-9 in the second floor lobby.

Above: Detail, Les Demoiselles d’Illinois (in progress), maps, ink, glue, paper

This Thursday, several shows I’ve organized for other artists are opening in my building (and environs). Next Saturday, September 9, another artist is presenting my work at her gallery. Let’s hear it for artists helping artists.

Thursday, September 7, from 5-9 PM at 110 Cherry Street, ’57 Biscayne will hold our fourth annual 100 under $100 show, featuring lots of take-home-able work by dozens of artists. Dara Solliday & I curate this event every year, and I do believe that overall quality of the work this year is the best ever. Stuff will be flying off the walls.

As a bonus, we’ll be serenaded by the always-fabulous Victor Janusz on the piano while people snatch up lots of fun and unexpected art.

Elsewhere in the Good Arts Building, the shiny new Cherry Street Coffee House in-house gallery will have its soft debut, with C.Y., a show I’ve curated of abstract works by ’57 Biscayne artists. The gallery will feature bimonthly shows, and I’m lining up some exciting guest curators to partner with me in the venture. NOT your average coffee house art, let’s just say.

Downstairs in the new Arcade, guest artist Fernando Sancho is installing a pop-up show of his photographs, African Dream Academy, while new resident artists Gina Grey and Ieva Ansaberger will be showing paintings, photographs, and mixed media works in their studios–in-progress and in the hallway gallery.

Down the street at Arundel Books, Original Hits by Original Artists, fake album covers by approximately 33-1/3 real artists, is being remounted, will be open for First Thursday, and viewable throughout the month of September.

Saturday in Georgetown, artist Tammy Spears, who has been for several years hosting really cool, once top-secret, art shows in a gallery carved out of her charming Georgetown home, will be featuring my work along with that of Tia Matthies. That is at:

Guest Shed Gallery
739 S. Homer St.
Saturday, September 9, 6-9 PM : Georgetown Art Attack
& Sunday, September 10 1-5 PM

 

My great-grandmother, Mary Gulish, immigrated from Slovakia to Youngstown, Ohio early in the last century. She’d heard some rumors that prospects were better in Cleveland. After first sending her eleven-year-old daughter on a scouting mission, she showed up in Cleveland one day with eleven kids in tow, knowing not a soul and very little English. The family got off the interurban train in a mixed immigrant neighborhood on the West Side and walked up to a random house. Mary knocked on the door. It was answered by a lady who spoke Slovak. The lady took in this stranger and her eleven children (and presumably my great-grandfather, but he’s never made it into any of the versions of this story that I’ve heard). She encouraged Mary to buy a house, advice she followed, eventually housing a rotating cast of generations of relatives and getting the family through the Depression. Hence my obsession with the American Dream.

A few months ago, a young artist from Prague, Edita Pattova, found me on the internet and sent me an email asking if I might have space to host her traveling exhibit. With much of Good Arts Building in flux, I didn’t know where we’d put her but I figured we could come up with something. Edita showed up on my doorstep last week and, while I was lacking in the traditional gigantic plate of cold cuts with which my people traditionally welcome their guests, I did welcome her and her art into my building. Naturally, she turned out to be Slovak. Her mother is from the same region as my mother’s family. It was as if Mary Gulish herself had sent her. As Edita is only traveling and not immigrating, I haven’t badgered her about buying a house yet, but there is still time.

This Thursday, the Good Arts Building welcomes Czech artist Edita Pattova, presenting Neon Dreamer, an interactive painting and video installation, on the first stop of its West Coast tour. Neon Dreamer will be up for one night only, Thursday, August 3, from 5-9 PM in the under-construction Good Arts Arcade at 108 Cherry Street.

Inspired by the neon lights of Times Square on a visit to New York, Edita created a grid of nine oil paintings depicting an imaginary American city. On it, she projects an original video game, inspired by Pac-man, which visitors can play singly or competitively, becoming the dreamers chasing their dreams, beer, money, and each other through the neon-lit painted city streets, while dodging the authorities and other hazards. I intend to play, even though I’m pretty lousy at PacMan. Please stop by if you are out for First Thursday and Seattle Art Fair.

Side projects with specific rules and formats are good for shaking up the old brain cells, and reinvigorating the artistic process. I have three pieces going right now that are not typical “Jane Paintings”, and all of them happen to be square. Two of the squares are from a show of my own making, and I’ve roped in a passel of other artists to join me in the madness. (Read about the third square here.)

Music has always been my painting muse, and a source of inspiration and comfort long before I was a painter. I was even a radio DJ when I was a student at the University of Chicago in the 1980’s. We spun records then, and not quaintly or ironically, either. There was a sizeable room at the station stacked floor-to-ceiling with record albums  (I do hope it’s still there) to sift through before your show started. Sometimes I’d pick something out solely because I liked the cover.

The cover! They all had covers! Nice, generous, roomy, 144 square inches of loveliness or weirdness or creepiness or bad art or good art. But they always gave a little hint about what was on the inside. So when the Upstream Music Fest approached the Good Arts Building owners last year about hosting a music venue this May, I knew that I wanted to curate a visual art show inside the venue, and I knew exactly what it would be . . .

ORIGINAL HITS BY ORIGINAL ARTISTS!

I invited a bunch of artists–friends, Biscayne regulars, people whose sensibility seemed to fit the project–to create fake album covers for imaginary bands. And approximately 33-1/3 of them said yes, so now we are going to have a show. It opens Thursday, May 4, at 108 Cherry Street, on the first floor of the Good Arts Building, right next to the entrance to the studios.  During the Upstream Fest, May 11-13, we’ll have free live music on site from 4-8 PM, so one can feast ears and eyes at the same time. The show will also be open May 18, 19, 25, and 26 from 1-6 PM, and by appointment.

My instinct is to keep the album covers, particularly the band names, both my own and others’, under wraps until the opening. But a few images from the process of creating them can keep you guessing.

Bonus fun fact: Album Cover Art by a Famous Artist

Sure, we all know about Andy Warhol’s screenprinted banana, but fewer people are aware of Salvador Dali’s contribution to the genre. I don’t know if he’s responsible for the typeface, too, but it’s rather satisfying.