Positive/Negative 39 National Juried Art Exhibition
Juror: Michelle Fisher, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
POSITIVE/NEGATIVE 39 National Juried Art Exhibition
February 12 to March 8, 2024, Slocumb Galleries
Awarding Reception: March 7, Thursday at 5 p.m. followed by
Juror's Lecture at 6 p.m., Ball Hall Auditorium
Lecture via ZOOM ID 710 908 499; video recording
Best in Show: Valerie George
Honorable Mention: Eloise Philpot, Monika Malewska, Elizabeth Weber
Positive/Negative 39 Artists: Shafaq Ahmad, Micaela Amateau Amato, Danqi Cai,
Laura Chessin, Pate Conaway, Gregory Scott Cook, Robert Craig, Claudia Crisan Calabria,
Benjamin Davis, Alexander Diaz, Danielle Eubank, Morgan Ford Willingham,
Katherine Frensley, Valerie George, Victoria Goro-Rapoport, Lucy Hale, Erika Haley,
Ashleigh Hillen, Tung Ning Huang, John Kinsland, Amy Kravitz, Carol Ladewig,
Tina Linville, Monika Malewska, Cat Mazza, Larissa McPherson, Greg Miller,
Izumi Miyazaki, Eileen Neff, Mable Ni, Melanie Norris, Eloise Philpot, Joe Reynolds,
Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, Jessica Swank, Elizabeth Weber
Positive/Negative 39 National Juried Art Exhibition
Curatorial Statement – Michelle Millar Fisher – February 2024
One of the greatest pleasures of being a curator is making studio visits with artists and learning more about their practice through close looking, attentive listening, and a peek into their motivations for making. Being a juror can feel a little like this too, but in miniature. Sifting through artist statements and images of work brings its own special joy and the chance to uncover practices and artworks previously unmet. Such was the case looking through the strong and varied entrants to the Positive/Negative 39 National Juried Art Exhibition.
While the selection process was undertaken with no specific criteria or predetermined theme in mind, several strands of inquiry emerged in constellations of work once the 39 artists had been chosen. These themes include a pronounced attentiveness to mothering, caretaking, and the emotional and physiological aspects of human reproduction; the expressive and abstract potential of color, materiality, and form across media; the enduring importance of the natural world as a source of artistic inspiration, including sensitivity to ecological issues and the fragile wonder of the environment; and the continued centrality of the human figure through which to explore questions of subjectivity and relationality.
In their paintings, Izumi Miyazaki and Melanie Norris gesture to the tender intimacy as well as the quotidian aspects of relationships between infants and their carers, while Greg Miller’s atmospheric photographs of school-age children waiting for their morning buses at the end of their driveways points to the repeated routines of many who raise children and the worry they face letting them go each morning. Coralina Rodriguez Meyer’s white plaster cast is ringed in moonlight, linking reproduction and lunar cycles. Made with residential construction materials, the artist “repurposes material refuse as a maternal refuge.” Danqi Cai dives into complicated questions about the ethics of human reproduction from her own specific experience of being born and raised under China's one-child policy and preference for male babies. In her video work in this exhibition, she and her husband sculpt a baby from clay to represent their joint decision not to procreate. This is framed as an expression of individual and collective care in the face of ecological collapse. Morgan Ford Willingham’s hand embroidered cyanotype on found textiles investigates the role of nature versus nurture in mothering daughters. Mable Ni turns to food making and cultural identity in a monoprint juxtaposed with a black and white photograph. Both explore the nourishment shared within her Chinese-American family as a form of care.
Across media, Laura Chessin, Shafaq Ahmad, Carol Ladewig, and Larry Graeber interrogate shape and color to produce rhythmic effect on two-dimensional surfaces. Inspired by the cosmos, in Ahmad’s work, the colorful biomorphic shapes represent the infinite permutations of creation within the universe, while the writing in the background repeats the Arabic words for creator, evolver, and designer. Graeber uses foil leaf, paint, felt it, and metal tape to glittering effect, while the work of John Kinsland, Robert Craig, and Tina Linville continue this conversation, combining moldable and found materials in three dimensions. Craig’s welded steel vessels read at first glance as if made of clay, mining historical forms in a new material. Also notable in this thematic conversation of energetic, expressionistic abstraction are Monika Malewska’s (“Honorable Mention” awardee) canvases which depict ambiguous squiggles that might be spaghetti, ground meat, or entrails, each with their own power to comment on capitalism and consumption. Cat Mazza’s brightly-colored tessellated and embroidered cubes read, at first glance, in the language of traditional quilting. However, they invite the reader to interact using their cell phone to bring her illustrations alive through augmented reality, a compelling bridge between the analog and digital.
A group of artists within the juried pool center nature as their subject, including Danielle Eubank, Dominique Ellis, Erika Haley, and Eileen Neff who use the medium of photography. Ellis, Haley, and Neff home in on fragments of the natural world in their delicate and detailed photography, as does Eubank in her paintings which capture the slicks and swirls of some of the most polluted bodies of water in the United States. Larissa McPherson and Jessica Swank present us with fragmentary evidence of natural processes and sediment, playing with what is real and what might be constructed or manipulated in the present. Elizabeth Weber's (“Honorable Mention” awardee) gorgeous pine-needle basket is evidence of nature’s provision of raw materials for making, while Pate Conaway’s sculpture merges the irregular cone of a bee nest fashion from crocheted paper with a found object, a wooden bee container made for shipping and selling the insects. Katherine Frensley’s majestic weaving employs natural dyes including madder root and uses found fabric and yarn. Tung Ning Huang’s beautiful lithograph evokes the swirling patterns of water, in his words "focusing on the simple comfort of nature's intricacies” and recognizing the natural world around us as "full of small gifts.” When Benjamin Davis mined his paternal history, he similarly found references to bodies of water, specifically waterfalls. He then sought out these natural phenomena to create his atmospheric and meditative cyanotypes created in part using whiskey emulsion as a gesture to another part of his family archive, alcoholism. Victoria Goro-Rappaort’s vision of Venice analogizes the city as a beautiful withering flower, celebrating its landmarks while acknowledging the pressure that their draw puts on the natural environment that surrounds them. A recipient of the “Honorable Mention” award, Eloise Philpot, shares a delicate story of natural life cycles and seasonality through an animated short where paint swirls in and out of the picture frame.
Finally, in a group of artists who dance around the human figure as their subject, several — including Joe Reynolds, Angela Shaffer, and Valerie George (“Best in Show” award) — take us straight into the lives of others through their piercing photographic narratives. George’s magnificent recumbent nude is a brave and striking portrait that cannily plays with histories of supine women painted by European male artists in the nineteenth century while paying homage to feminist forebears who bluntly interrogated illness, disability, and the female body. Ashleigh Hillen similarly brings us into the intimate lives of others through her painted portraiture, while Micaela Amateau Amato invites us to consider sculptural busts that evoke her ancestral Moroccan and Iberian hybrid heritage. Other works, like those of Gregory Scott Cook, Alexander Diaz, Lucy Julia Hale, and Claudia Crisan Calabria abstract from the lives of others as well as their own. Scott Cook’s work is a palimpsest of musical, visual, and personal references that hint at the geographic space separating him and his five-year-old daughter, and includes the image of an eagle as a symbol of longed-for transcendence of their situation. Hale’s works similarly uses collage techniques but moves the lens out into society, using found illustrations, snapshots, and artifacts from cultural archives to make comment on social justice and civil rights. Crisan Calabria’s poetic and moving sculptural meditation is born from an experience with her own child and navigating disability and social adaptation. Diaz points towards the sacred body of Christ within homemade shrines, in his eyes a way to "draw attention to the need for humans to have their faith confirmed and validated by representations.” Amy Kravitz’s The Hour Coat is a hypnotic hand-drawn animated short that foregrounds visceral visual experience over didactic narrative.
About the Juror:
Michelle Millar Fisher is currently the Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work focuses on the intersections of people, power, and the material world. At the MFA, she is working on her next project, “Craft Schools: Where We Make What We Inherit” which took her on a train journey across all 48 contiguous US states, as well as the upcoming contemporary collection reinstallation called “Tender Loving Care.” As part of an independent team, she leads “Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births,” a book, touring exhibition, and series of programs. Find it on Instagram at @designingmotherhood.
The recipient of an MA and an M.Phil in Art History from the University of Glasgow,
Scotland, she received an M.Phil from and is currently completing her doctorate in
art history at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). She
is widely published, and has received numerous fellowships, including from the Pew,
Sachs, and Graham Foundations, and DAAD.
Previously, she was The Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator of European Decorative
Arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art where she co-organized “Designs for Different
Futures” in 2019. From 2014-2018 she was a Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Modern
Art, New York, where she co-organized, among other exhibitions, “Design and Violence”
and “Items: Is Fashion Modern?” In 2010-11, she was a research intern in Arms & Armor
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In 2011, she co-founded ArtHistoryTeachingResources.org, a Kress Foundation-funded
project now used in over 185 countries. In 2019, she co-founded Art + Museum Transparency,
home to the Salary Transparency Spreadsheet. She was part of the 2022 fellow cohort
at the Center for Curatorial Leadership.
https://michellemillarfisher.com/