SPOTLIGHT:
VIRGINIA JARAMILLO
BOOTH C52
Preview Day: Thursday 4th May 2017
Public Opening Hours:
Thursday 5th May - Sunday 7th May
Frieze New York
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SPOTLIGHT: VIRGINIA JARAMILLO, FRIEZE NEW YORK, BOOTH C52
Hales Gallery is delighted to announce its return to Frieze New York for the fair’s 2017 edition,
with a revelatory presentation of American artist Virginia Jaramillo’s spectacular curvilinear
abstractions. Coinciding with Frieze, Jaramillo’s work, including a curvilinear painting, will
feature in the Brooklyn Museum’s We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85. Tate
Modern’s Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (12 July – 22 October 2017, London,
UK) will feature another work from the series.
Painted in New York in the 1970s, these bold canvases, shown publicly at Frieze New York for
the first time in over four decades, brilliantly express the creative vision of a previously underrecognised artist now receiving renewed and deserved attention.
Across her rich and varied practice, Jaramillo has continually explored abstraction, rigorously
experimenting with material and process to, in Jaramillo’s words, translate ‘the structure of our
physical, spiritual and mental worlds’ through space and geometry in art. After relocating to
New York from California in 1967 following the civil rights protests, Jaramillo’s painting evolved
in response to her new environment. Immersed in the New York arts community, working
alongside figures such as Melvin Edwards, Frank Bowling and Sam Gilliam, Jaramillo embarked
on her ‘curvilinear’ paintings: intensely vivid fields of colour disrupted by precisely painted lines
in contrasting shades that curve, divide and intersect.
Originally debuted in the seminal 1971 DeLuxe Show in Houston, Texas (supported by the
Menil Foundation), and in the 1972 Whitney Annual, Jaramillo’s curvilinear paintings were
received with critical acclaim and recognition of their significance. In a 1970 review of these
works, Bowling describes them as a ‘response to paint more physical than cerebral’. Indeed, the
physical materiality of her medium (in this case, paint) is central to Jaramillo’s work; for these
canvases, she spent many hours mixing paints to create deep colour fields in which new tones
are revealed in different lights and from different angles. The resulting experience transports
the viewer beyond the painted surface, evoking cosmic or metaphysical planes of existence.
Virginia Jaramillo (b. 1939, El Paso, Texas) studied at Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, from 1958–
61. Jaramillo lives and works in New York.
Jaramillo’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions at prestigious
institutions, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (1959–61), Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York (1972), Mexican Museum, San Francisco (1980), A.I.R.
Gallery, New York (1984), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011), MoMA PS1, New York
(2012), Brooklyn Museum, New York (2014, 2016) and Tate Modern, London (2016). Selected
public and corporate collections include the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Richfield,
Connecticut; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Mexican Museum, San Francisco;
Pasadena Art Museum, California; Kemper Museum, Missouri and the Museo Rufino Tamayo,
Mexico City.
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VIRGINIA JARAMILLO, Untitled, 1971, acr ylic on canvas, 213.5 x 183 cm, 84 1/8 x 72 1/8 in
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VIRGINIA JARAMILLO, Untitled, 1971, oil on canvas, 243.5 x 182.7 cm, 95 7/8 x 71 7/8 in
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VIRGINIA JARAMILLO, Untitled, 1973, acr ylic on canvas, 183.2 x 183.4 cm, 72 1/8 x 72 1/8 in
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Top to bottom: The ‘Deluxe Show’ exhibition view, 1971; Helen Winkler, Peter Br adley, Kenneth Noland, and Clement
Greenber g installing ‘The Deluxe Show’, with Vir ginia Jar amillo’s ‘Untitled’ (1971) in the background, 1971. Images cou
tesy of Menil Archives, The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: Hickey-Rober tson, Houston
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VIRGINIA JARAMILLO
Frank Bowling Art in America, Arts Magazine, November 1970, pg. 31
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Jonathan Griffin, ‘Into Unpaved Territory: From ‘hippie modernism’ to concrete poetry, Toby Kamps discusses his vision for Spotlight’, Frieze Week companion, New
York 2017
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Sarah Roberts, ‘Virginia Jaramillo: Where The Heavens Touch The Earth’,
Twin, 19th January 2017
From today Hales Gallery will play host to Virginia Jaramillo’s
first solo exhibition outside of her native US. Entitled ‘Where the
Heavens Touch the Earth’, the exhibition will display her work
from the 1970s, which is striking in its underlying geometry.
Bringing together a selection of large-scale canvases and the series
Visual Theorems, the work crosses boundaries between painting
and drawing, and canvas and paper, creating a tangible materiality.
Virginia Jaramillo’s career has spanned almost six decades. Born in
El Paso, Texas, she spent her formative years in California, before
living briefly in Europe and then relocating to New York City,
where she still lives today. She is focused on expressing cultural
constructs and sensory perceptions of space and time through
her work, and draws inspiration from widely varied sources,
including science fiction and Celtic and Greek mythologies. We
spoke to Virginia about her work, New York in the 1970s, and
her artistic influences.
The name of your exhibition “Where the Heavens Touch
the Earth”, lends itself to the notion of boundaries and
transcendence. Where does this title come from and how do
these themes feed into your work?
The title stems directly from Teotihuacan, an ancient archeological
site several miles outside present day Mexico City. Teotihuacan
symbolizes and alludes to, “the place where the heavens touch
the earth” and “the place where the gods were born.” This place,
aligned so precisely with cardinal points and certain star systems,
has played a large role in my work. Since childhood I’ve been
fascinated and intrigued with why people and cultures believe
what they do, and how their myths of creation are transformed
into truths. What happened for this belief system to take hold?
How does your work play with the structural patterns we use
to interpret the world and the flow of space and time?
My work is an aesthetic investigation of the sensory matrix we
superimpose upon our environment, our lives, and our cultural
myths, so we can comprehend and survive in the world around
us. I believe that the fabric of time and space is inextricably
interwoven into every civilization that has ever existed.
Your choice of materials has developed since your celebrated
‘Black Paintings’ that were made in California. What drove
your selection of medium at that time?
The ‘Black Painting’ period was a time of extreme financial and
political hardship, socially and artistically. If I wanted to paint, I had
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to use any material that was readily available at our neighborhood
hardware store. I began preparing my own rabbit skin glue and
gesso from scratch and using cheap black and dark brown paints
that I grew to love. The journey with the black paintings, which
began from a period of financial need, was a blessing in disguise
for me as an artist. It gave me a voice.
Can you tell us about your year spent living in Europe in the
1960s, how was that formative for you?
California is a very special place, and its beauty had a tremendous
effect on my formative years and still feeds my sensibilities
as an artist. But coming straight from California, Europe, and
specifically Paris, was an eye-opener. Europe was truly an alien
planet. Everywhere I walked or looked, there was a sense of
the historical, and I was present and a part of it. Everything was
‘art’; the food I ate, the shop windows, the paintings hanging
in Le Louvre. It was a visual and sensory feast. After living in
Europe, I never looked back. I knew I could never survive as a
creative being in an art environment where so much was closed
to minorities.
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Virginia Jaramillo, Visual Theorems 12, 1980
During your transition from West to East coast, how did your
painting develop, and how did your relationship to abstraction
shift?
I have always been concerned with abstraction. My involvement
with a particular spatial construct allows me to look beyond the
literal, which the canvas creates. It becomes deep sensory space.
Whilst in New York City in the 1970s and 80s, you were
involved with various feminist organizations, including the
celebrated Heresies Magazine and legendary A.I.R. Gallery.
Can you discuss this moment for women artists and your
place within it?
To be honest, at the time I was not as involved as many women
artists of the period. Being married to a black artist, raising two
children, being a Mexican-American woman artist, and squeezing
in time to do my work was difficult. Dealing with the racial bias
of the time could defeat anyone. My life was a political statement.
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New York, 64 Delancey Street, NY 10002. +1 (646) 918 7205
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Virginia Jaramillo, Visual Theorems 18, 1979
During this period I worked with the staff of Heresies Magazine
for their ‘Third World Women’ issue, which was very gratifying.
Being on the board of advisors of ‘The Feminist Art Institute’, and
helping to organize a successful benefit auction for a scholarship
fund for women artists is something I’m very proud of. As is
being part of ‘Women Artists of the 80’s’ at A.I.R. Gallery in New
York City, which was curated by Corinne Robins.
This will be your first solo exhibition outside of the US.What’s
next?
I’m excited to be participating in two major museum shows later
in the year; ‘We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women
1965-85’ at The Brooklyn Museum in New York and ‘Soul of a
Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power’ at the Tate Modern. In
May, Hales Gallery will feature several of my Curvilinear paintings
from the 1970s in the Spotlight section of Frieze New York art
fair.
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Daisy Schofield, Interview | Virginia Jaramillo, Schön!, 28 March 2017
Virginia Jaramillo’s richly varied, expressive and experimental paintings
reflect a fruitful career spanning over six decades. Having spent
her formative years amongst a thriving community of West Coast
artists, Jaramillo’s painterly style is in many respects aligned with her
contemporaries. However, as Jaramillo discusses in an exclusive
interview with Schön!, working as a female artist in a predominantly
male circle meant that asserting her artistic identity posed many a
challenge.
Jaramillo’s monumental canvases shun traditional modes of
representation in favour of a “visual translation of the structural patterns
we superimpose onto reality, in order to organise our experience”.
Her intention is to offer a new mode of perception, through “straight
lines, arcs and forms which organise the paintings into fields of colour”.
She draws these “organisational systems” from sources ranging
from “classical geometry, pre-Hispanic architecture, and the ancient
civilizations which built their cities and credited their very existence to
beliefs, cultural myths and cosmologies in order to better understand
their world”.
Alongside these historic sources, the rigorous order and pared down
aesthetic of Jaramillo’s work can also be attributed to the prevalence
West Coast Minimalism. This community of Californian artists – Larry
Bell and Robert Irwin amongst them – absorbed the New York strand
of Minimalism made popular in the 1960s and 70s by the likes of Dan
Flavin, Donald Judd and Carl Andre, but with a distinctly industrial
approach.
The main proponents of Conceptual Art when it first emerged were
male: “serious women artists were few”, Jaramillo recalls. “I remember a
time when a gallery would not bother (they were “too busy”) to look
at your work if you were a woman; dismissing the work and the artist
straight away. You could forget it all together, if you were a woman,
married and a minority”.
Forging her artistic identity – particularly as a woman – was “a
demoralising uphill battle everyday”. The strength of her determination
paid off when her work was displayed at LACMA’s Annual Exhibition
in 1959 at age 18, under the gender-neutral title ‘V. Jaramillo’. It was a
moment which filled her with the conviction to continue “carving out a
place for [her] self as an artist”.
This is precisely what Jaramillo would go on to do. Deviating from the
“Finish Fetish” that typified the art of her Californian contemporaries
– with its emphasis on glossy enamels and industrial plastics – Jaramillo
opted for more experimental and organic surface textures. “In my
earliest works, I used basic household paint and commercial stains, and
boiled my own gesso and rabbit-skin glue, because it was all I could
afford”, the artist explains.
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Virginia Jaramillo, Origin Legend, 1972 (Photo by Charlie Littlewoood)
“I was drawn to using linen fibers when I learned it was rare to use only
linen as the actual artwork. Then making the sheet as thin as possible
while maintaining the sheet’s integrity – something no-one had done
before.”
Whilst Jaramillo’s art has been primarily concerned with the interrogation
of materials and systems of perception, she maintains that her “personal
and artistic life has been a political statement”. This is partly fuelled by
her Mexican-American heritage, and to “living in California in the early
1960s as an interracial couple with a young family”. Her experiences led
to her involvement in various feminist projects, such as the Third World
Women issue of Heresies journal, and working on the board of the
Feminist Art institute. Jaramillo’s art may not comment directly on the
social and political anxieties that have shaped her life, but it’s certainly
perceptible in the weightiness of her dark and imposing canvases.
Looking to the future, Jaramillo hopes to continue approaching her
art with this same intellectual and material curiosity. Her career may
not represent a linear progression as such, but “there’s a consistent
conceptual current running from the start: my investigation into systems
of perception, which I have never really abandoned”, she explains. The
most important lesson Jaramillo claims to have learnt as an artist? “Stay
true to your self ”. Staunchly committed to her own artistic prerogative,
it’s clearly a mantra that Jaramillo stands by.
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Holland Cotter, To Be Black, Female and Fed Up With the Mainstream,
New York Times, April 20, 2017
gains, including feminist gains, of the past half-century appear
to be up for grabs.
Whether those gains have ever not been up for grabs is a
question to consider, though the show asks more specific
historical ones. Such as:What did women’s liberation, primarily
a white, middle-class movement, have to offer AfricanAmerican women in a country where, as late as the 1960s, de
facto slavery still existed; a country where racism, which the
movement itself shared, was soaked into the cultural fabric?
Under the circumstances, to be black, female and pursuing a
career in art was a radical move.
The show starts in the early 1960s, with the formation in New
York City of the black artists’ group Spiral, composed mostly of
established professionals — Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis,
Hale Woodruff — who debated the pros and cons, ethical
and aesthetic, of putting art in the service of the civil rights
movement. In all the talk, at least one political issue seems
to have been passed over: the group’s gender bias. Among its
15 regular members, there was only one woman, the painter
Emma Amos — then in her early 20s and one of Woodruff’s
students — who would go on to make important political art.
Virginia Jaramillo, Untitled, 1971
One reason for the hullabaloo around Dana Schutz’s painting
of the murdered Emmett Till in the current Whitney Biennial is
the weakness of the work. It looks half-baked, unresolved. Like
a lot of recent “political” art, it doesn’t try for a weight suitable
to, and therefore respectful of, its racially charged, morally
shattering subject. The result, to use one writer’s words, is “a
tasty abstraction designed purposefully or inadvertently” to
evoke an image of “common oppression.”
Actually, those dismissive words weren’t written about the
Schutz painting. They were written in 1970 by the AfricanAmerican critic Linda La Rue about the vaunted cross-cultural
embrace of the second-wave feminist movement. The writer
eyed with deep distrust the movement’s assumption that it
could speak with authority for all women, including black
women.
Ms. La Rue’s words are in the catalog for the exhibition “We
Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85” at the
Brooklyn Museum. And her critical perspective is one that to
a large degree shapes this spare-looking show, which takes a
textured view of the political past — a past that is acquiring
renewed weight in the immediate present when the civil rights
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By the time Spiral dispersed in 1965, the social mood of the
country was tense. Black Power consciousness was on the rise
– you’ll find a detailed account of its growth in the exhibition
“Black Power!” at the Schomburg Center for Research in
Black Culture — and art was increasingly a vehicle for racial
assertion. The multidisciplinary Black Arts Movement took
form in Harlem and spread to Chicago. There it spawned a
subsidiary group called AfriCobra (African Commune of Bad
Relevant Artists) which, with its interweave of black nationalism,
spirituality, free jazz and brilliantly colored patterning, had a
wide, sparks-shooting embrace. Yet it attracted relatively few
female participants. Two — the prolific printmaker Barbara
Jones-Hogu, and the fashion designer Jae Jarrell, who painted
directly on her clothes — are in the show.
By the 1970s, feeling the pressures of racism from outside
the African-American world, and the pressures of Black Power
sexism within it, female artists formed their own collectives,
without necessarily identifying them as feminist. One of the
earliest, called Where We At, was initiated in Brooklyn in 1971
by Vivian E. Browne, Dindga McCannon and the redoubtable
Faith Ringgold. After organizing what it advertised as “the
first Black Women’s art exhibition in known history,” the
group turned its second show into a benefit for black unwed
mothers and their children.
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The practical generosity of that gesture said a lot about how
a distinctive African-American feminism would develop. Black
collectives were embedding themselves, at street level, in
communities, running educational workshops, scrounging up
funds for day-care centers, and making inexpensive art —
graphically striking posters, for example. “Our struggle was
primarily against racial discrimination — not singularly against
sexism,” said the painter Kay Brown, a Where We At member.
Her measured words barely hint at the hostility felt by some
black artists toward a mainstream feminist movement that in
their view ignored the black working-class poor and sometimes
its own racism. And anger sometimes comes through in the
work. It does in the fierce hilarity of a short 1971 film called
“Colored Spade” by Betye Saar that flashes racial stereotypes
at us like rapid-fire bullets, and in a funky 1973 assemblage
called “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Cocktail,” by the same
artist, which turns a California wine jug with a “mammy”
image on one side and a Black Power fist on another, into a
homemade bomb.
As the 1970s went on, black women began to participate, with
their guard always up, in feminist projects like the all-woman
A.I.R. Gallery and the Heresies Collective, at least until they
were reminded of their outsider status. At the same time, they
found a warm welcome at Just Above Midtown, a Manhattan
gallery opened by Linda Goode Bryant in 1974 to show black
contemporary art. Archival material related to this remarkable
space, which closed in 1986, fills one of the exhibition’s several
display cases and makes fascinating reading, as does a vivacious
interview with Ms. Bryant by the critic Tony Whitfield reprinted
in a “Sourcebook” that serves as an exhibition catalog.
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Major pieces by artists whose careers Ms. Bryant helped start
and sustained — Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine
O’Grady, Howardena Pindell — appear in galleries devoted
to the late 1970s and ’80s, when an unprecedented amount
of mixing was in progress. A multiculturalist vogue brought
women and African-American artists into the spotlight. In
a kind of parody of tolerance, the Reagan-era culture wars
attacked artists across gender and racial lines. So did the H.I.V./
AIDS epidemic.
The show ends with heirs to the Just Above Midtown
generation. Some of them — Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae
Weems — we know well. Others, like the great dancer Blondell
Cummings and the Rodeo Caldonia High-Fidelity Performance
Theater, we need to know more about. And the exhibition,
organized by Catherine Morris of the museum’s Elizabeth A.
Sackler Center for Feminist Art and Rujeko Hockley, a former
curator at the Brooklyn Museum now at the Whitney Museum
of American Art, at least encourages us to learn.
And it leads us to at least one broad conclusion: that the
African-American contribution to feminism was, and is,
profound. Simply to say so — to make an abstract, triumphalist
claim — is easy, but inadequate. It fails to take the measure of
lived history. The curators of “We Wanted a Revolution: Black
Radical Women, 1965-85” do better than that just by doing
their homework.They let counternarrative contradictions and
confused emotions stand.The only change I would make, apart
from adding more artists, would be to tweak its title: I’d edit it
down to its opening phrase and put that in the present tense.
__________________________________________________
We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85
Through Sept. 17 at the Brooklyn Museum; 718-638-5000,
brooklynmuseum.org.
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Gabrielle Schwarz, Breaking through darkness:Virginia Jaramillo’s curvilinear
abstractions, April 2017
of suburban L.A. The final straw was the infamous 1965 Watts
Riot, which was triggered by accusations from the black community of police discrimination and brutality and lasted for 6
days, resulting in 34 deaths and over 1000 injuries as well as
millions of dollars of property damage. In Jaramillo’s words,
‘[w]e were in Watts when Watts was burning. The little house
behind our house caught fire. We drove out of Watts and we
never went back.’2
Virginia Jaramillo, Tau Ceti, 1970
In 1967 Virginia Jaramillo arrived in New York. The 27-yearold,
Texas-born artist had spent most of her life before this point
in Los Angeles. She attended L.A.’s Manual Arts High School,
where a celebrated fine art programme provided early education for ac-claimed artists of the future, including Philip
Guston, Jackson Pollock and Jaramillo’s eventual husband Daniel LaRue Johnson. Next came the Otis Art Institute, also in
L.A. By now Jaramillo was already getting plenty of attention
for her abstract compositions, made from a mix of whichever
materials she could afford to obtain, in which she was beginning to explore her enduring themes of colour, line and ways
of seeing.
In a recent interview, Mel Edwards, talking about the loose circle of artist friends living in California at the time, noted that
Jaramil-lo was ‘the first one of us to show at a gallery’.1 Aged
just 18 in 1959, Jaramillo had one of her works selected for
inclusion in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s annual
exhibition. She went on to participate in the 1960 and 1961
editions of the annual, signing her works as the gender-neutral
‘V. Jaramillo’.
But by the mid-1960s Jaramillo and Johnson, now raising a
young family in the neighbourhood of Watts, had had enough
of the increasingly unstable and racially charged atmosphere
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Jaramillo and her family moved to Europe, living in Paris and
travelling throughout France as well as England, Italy and Spain.
She continued to paint during this time, creating a series of
small abstract paintings done in oils and beeswax.These paintings primar-ily feature the same earthy palette of blacks and
browns that dominated her work from the last years in California. For Jaramillo, these colours, to which she was naturally drawn (and were the only ones she could afford to buy),
had initially seemed fitting because she felt that they reflected
something of L.A.’s painful, anger-filled environment. ‘We didn’t
talk about working in black. But horrible things were happening in the Civil Rights Movement; our surroundings were not
good, and in a way, the colors indicated that something was
terribly wrong.’3 In Europe this was no longer the case; there,
‘people didn’t pay attention to the color of your skin’4 – a liberating experience for Jaramillo, a Mexican American married
to an African American.
Jaramillo’s dark palette began to open up. At the edges of her
canvases, the black and brown textured fields would give way
to glimpses of brighter colour – reds and oranges from much
earlier work reappeared.
This subtle shift, like Jaramillo’s home in Europe, proved to be
temporary. Before long Jaramillo – now living permanently in
New York and working from a bigger studio on Soho’s buzzing
Spring Street – would embark on a period of creative experimentation resulting in a body of work quite distinct from what
had come previously, in terms of scale, colour and emotion.
Using acrylic paint now instead of oils, Jaramillo would mix
multiple shades together to create a single colour, which she
would paint flatly onto large square and rectangular canvases. In many works, a dark background continued to dominate.
However, disrupting the concrete fields of colour, Jaramillo
would add curving and intersecting lines in a wide variety of
the brightest of shades. The composition of these lines would
initially be worked out on paper in sketches and drawings and
then enlarged on sheets of tracing paper, before being transferred with mathematical precision onto the painted surface.
Initially, in works from 1967–69, these lines were used to divide the canvas into different coloured fields. Gradually, however, the multiple background colours were stripped away; by
1970 nearly all of the compositions were reduced to a single
HALES LONDON NEW YORK
monochromatic flat field of paint cut through with razor-thin,
vividly coloured curved lines.
The resulting paintings represent a stark change from the dark,
textured surfaces and imprecise lines of Jaramillo’s earlier
work.The desired effect of the new works was one of extreme
contrast – Jaramillo has described the process as ‘trying to
play positives and negatives against each other’; consequently,
‘the surface color against the line vibrates... it comes alive.’5 In
this invocation of charged elements and vibrating lines, there
is the sense that for Jaramillo these new paintings represented
an important discovery, not just of a different way to paint
within the boundaries of the canvas, but of an actual source
of illuminating electric energy. In the 1973 painting Morning
Becomes Electra, a square black canvas is framed by two vertical
curved lines, one green and one blue, snaking down the edges. The work’s title refers to Eugene O’Neill’s 1931 dramatic
cycle Mourning Becomes Electra, a play on words invoking what
Jaramillo has poetically described as ‘the electric moment
when the sun breaks through darkness.’6 The same description could be applied to Jaramillo’s own artistic development,
as she channelled the creative energy of her new environment
in New York into these electrically bright lines.
Meanwhile, in other works such as the 1970 Green Dawn (another evocation of mornings and new days) darkness is banished completely. The canvas is painted a bright, fresh field of
green, one corner marked off by a curved yellow line. When
fellow painter Frank Bowling visited Jaramillo’s studio, he was
particularly struck by this work. Writing in the November
1970 issue of Arts Magazine, Bowling described the painting
as a ‘field of green charged with a lightening “whip” of acrid
lemon yellow line, undulating across the top right hand corner
of the painting with no apparent purpose except dynamite.’7
Once more, the curved lines are imbued with an active, electric force.
In the series of developments that took place in these early
years of Jaramillo’s career, we can begin to sense the profound
importance to her art of the concept (and realities) of place.
On one level, it is possible to trace the way in which her physical environment has impacted her creative output: practical
developments such as changes in what materials become available, as well as shifts in emotional atmosphere. Simultaneously, as a closer look at some of her curvilinear abstractions
will hopefully make clear, Jaramillo’s works can themselves be
understood as quasi-minimalist explorations of the same notion: thinking about how we experience the world around us
through the creation of her own worlds of pure colour and
form.
A year before the Whitney Annual, the 1970 Green Dawn was
included, alongside another untitled curvilinear composition,
in a landmark exhibition of contemporary abstraction: The DeLuxe Show.The 1971 exhibition was ground-breaking in several
important ways, most notably in that curator Peter Bradley
chose to exhibit abstract work by the most prominent artists of the time regard-less of their race or ethnicity, making
this one of the first ‘integrated’ exhibitions America had seen.
Bradley also decided to hold the show in a disused movie
theatre in a poor and predominantly black neighbourhood in
Houston, Texas, rather than New York, where many of the exhibited artists (Anthony Caro, Al Loving, Jules Olitski and Larry
Poons, amongst others) were based. More subtle but no less
significant was the decision to focus on what Bradley called
‘hard art’, that is, non-representational painting, at a time when
non-white artists were expected to be making explicitly political, representational work. Prior to this exhibition, there had
Another of Jaramillo’s curvilinear abstractions, a 1971 painting entitled Green Dawn 3 composed of a green line against a
purple background, made a high-profile appearance two years
later in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1972 Annual.
Green Dawn 3 constituted the third panel in a four-part composition at the exhibition’s entrance, alongside abstractions
by Cy Twombly, Larry Poons and Nancy Graves. The symbolic
weight of this presentation is clear; as Carter Ratcliff wrote
in a review published at the time, ‘Jaramillo, the fresh rookie,
stands for the unknown quantities intended to give this show
its real buzz.’8 That Jaramillo had been making and exhibiting
work in museum shows for over a decade was irrelevant. Her
curvilinear abstractions felt and looked like a fresh discovery –
and for Jaramillo they really were: an electric moment of light
breaking through darkness.
Virginia Jaramillo, Untitled, 1973
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been little room for the possibility that non-white artists and
audiences might identify with or wish to experience ‘hard art’,
or have anything to say about ‘abstract’ preoccupations such
as colour and form.
In his excellent analysis of the exhibition, Darby English writes
that ‘[a]mong the most salient images DeLuxe throws up is
that of a spatially expansive nucleus of turbulent color opened
in the midst of a politically monochromatic territory.’9 Within
the exhibi-tion’s context, the nonrepresentational approach of
the ‘color paintings’, as he calls them, comes to bear a radical
potential:
“The works invited a disposition toward art that was radical
by the representational standard urged upon children of the
ghetto: in the moment, such art says that other things and
experiences can constitute significant space. The moment
frees the subject not merely from fixated interest in her
own experience by drawing her toward the object she thus
wholly attends. It also opens her to that dimension of her
experience which originates in its recognition by another.”10
As abstract compositions, the works in the DeLuxe show create space – not through representation or threedimensional
form but through pure colour and line. By inviting the viewer
to enter and experience these spaces, they affirm the notion
of a decen-tred subject, whose experience and perception of
the world is shown to be far more contingent, and fluid, than
that insisted on by the ‘representational standard urged upon
children of the ghetto’.
While never stated in explicitly political terms, it is precisely
this question of how we experience space as embodied, situated subjects that Jaramillo has cited as the driving force behind
over half a century of abstraction:
“Our sensory system is constructed and organized in a way
which enables us to perceive what is termed threedimensional time and space. The ongoing interaction of time and
space constantly challenges our mind, continuously straining
the limits of our sense of what we perceive – testing the
very fabric and nature of the concepts by which we structure
our physical, spiritual and mental world.
sponse to her own environment, it seeks to provide a visual
equivalent to the deeply subjective experience of being in, perceiving and responding to the world around us.
This highly specific goal is signalled within the works through
some of the cryptic titles Jaramillo has assigned to her canvases. They allude to various ‘framework[s] of reference points’,
from geometric systems to mythological traditions and
spiritual cus-toms, which have been used in different times and
places to organise reality. O’Neill’s drama after which Morning
Becomes Electra is titled, for example, is itself a retelling of
Aeschylus’s Oresteia, a tragic trilogy that explores many of
Ancient Greece’s foundational myths. Two other paintings,
3,168 Codified (1974) and Gematria (1974), reference sacred
numerology, another instance of human-ity’s ingenious ability
to conjure systems that ascribe meaning to the mysteries of
the world. 3,168 was apparently honoured by early Christians
as an exceptionally sacred number. ‘Gematria’ is the name
given to the system, originating in Assyro-Babyloni-an-Greek
cultures and adopted into Jewish culture, which assigns words,
names and phrases with specific numerical values.
Implicit in the range of these allusions is an affirmation of
the plurality of (often contradictory) structures and systems,
across history and in different cultures, which have been
created and adopted to organise our experiences of reality.
Perception, whether of people, places or paintings, is understood as both utterly fluid and deeply rooted in one’s specific
environment. No wonder, perhaps, that Jaramillo settled on
abstraction, with its refusal to denote a fixed ‘objective’ reality,
as her chosen mode of artistic expression.While her paintings
clearly respond to the world and may even be conceived of
as ‘worlds’ in themselves, they also actively refuse to impose
a specific vision of any world onto the viewer. Indeed, despite
the carefully planned composition of line and the equally considered application of colour in her curvilinear abstractions,
Jaramillo has insisted that these works were ‘less about composition than mental space’; ‘I lay out the groundwork and the
viewer projects onto the space’, filling the ‘spatial arena with
their own feelings and experiences’.12
My work is an aesthetic investigation which seeks to translate into visual terms the mental and structural patterns we
all superimpose on our world – the framework of reference
points we use to distinguish the ‘real’ from the ‘unreal’.”11
Of course, this does not mean that viewers should feel pressured to try to devise elaborate personal interpretations or
narratives through which to understand the paintings. Rather,
it is an invitation to experience first-hand the way in which
our eyes and our minds begin to process the visual data in
front of us from our particular, embodied perspectives and to
translate these fields of colour into immersive, sensory spaces.
In this statement Jaramillo provides an important insight into
the nature of her own work. Not only does it evolve in re-
Stand in front of one of Jaramillo’s flat curvilinear abstractions
for long enough and the surface may begin to deepen, new
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shades emerging from the multiple layers of paint mixed together to create the monotone field. This is even more likely
to happen if you move around in front of the canvas, looking
at it from different angles or in different lights. Focusing on the
curved lines may have an altogether different effect; the ‘lightning whips’ may seem to radiate light onto the surrounding
surface, or, as English puts it, the line may seem to bear the
‘force of exertion’. In his analysis of Green Dawn, he describes
the line as ‘break[ing] the green field into two independent
units, which one experiences as farther away and possibly receding.’13 The painting is transformed from a spare, hard-edged
abstraction into a complex spatial environment through the
viewer’s own experience of the interaction between colour
and line.
This process, whereby the viewer becomes somehow included
in the work itself, recalls Michael Fried’s notorious definition
of minimalism, or what he called ‘literalist’ art, as that which –
in opposition to modernism – foregrounds ‘the experience …
of van object in a situation – one that, virtually by definition,
includes the beholder’.14 Fried’s condemnation of what he denounced vas ‘theatrical’ objects unwittingly revealed the great
power of minimalist art: its ability to expose as fiction the
idea of art and aesthetic experience as transcendent, existing
beyond history, culture and our own human bodies. Both the
object itself, as well as our experiences and perceptions of it,
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is instead powerfully situated in three-dimensional time and
space. In many ways – in their unpredictable curves, luminous
colour fields, and allusive, poetic titles – Jaramillo’s curvilinear
abstractions do not conform to the strictest rules of minimalism. Yet, it seems right to make this connection, because of
how these New York paintings say so little, but reveal so much
about how we see and experience the world.
_____________________________________________
1. Melvin Edwards, ‘Melvin Edwards by Michael Brenson’, BOMB, 24 November 2014.
http://bombmagazine.org/article/2000025/melvin-edwards [accessed 10 April
2017]
2. Virginia Jaramillo, artist statement in Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the
Sixties, exh. cat. (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2014), p. 15.
3. ibid.
4. ibid.
5.Virginia Jaramillo, phone conversation with author, 20 March 2017.
6.Virginia Jaramillo, phone conversation with author, 3 August 2016.
7. Frank Bowling, ‘Outside the Galleries: Four Young Artists’, Arts Magazine 45,
no. 2 (November 1970), p. 31.
8. Carter Ratcliff, ‘The Whitney Annual, Part I’, Artforum, April 1972.
9. Darby English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 208.
10. English, p. 247.
11.Virginia Jaramillo, ‘Visual Theorems’ (unpublished), 1981.
12.Virginia Jaramillo, phone conversation with author, 20 March 2017.
13. English, p. 226.
14. Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, in Art and Objecthood: Essays and
Reviews (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 153.