Meet our artists
ArtW collaborates with artists across all disciplines to better connect and promote the range of perspectives that exist in the art world. Meet our collaborators for "Women We Create" below.
GRIMANESA AMORÓS
Interdisciplinary Artist
Grimanesa Amorós is a New York-based American interdisciplinary artist with diverse interests in the fields of social history, scientific research, and critical theory. She has often drawn upon Peruvian cultural legacies as the inspiration for her large-scale light installations, which she has presented around the globe.
Through her art, where one feels that the past is meeting the future, she conveys a sense of ephemeral wonder, entrancing viewers from all different backgrounds and communities to inspire them to become agents of
empowerment. Grimanesa makes use of sculpture, video, and lighting to create works that illuminate our notions of personal identity and community.
She was a guest speaker at TEDGlobal 2014, recipient of the ‘NEA Visual Artist Fellowship’, the ‘NEA Artist Travel Grant’, and has the distinction of being part of the ‘Art In Embassies Program of the U.S.’ Amorós has exhibited in the United States, Europe, Middle East, Asia and Latin America.
RINAT SHERZER
Interdisciplinary Biotech Engineer
Rinat Sherzer (Top 40 Women Keynote Speakers according to Real Leaders Magazine),
is a New York based interdisciplinary biotech engineer, ethical designer, adjunct professor & social entrepreneur, tackling complex social issues around equality, diversity and inclusion.
She's an Adjunct Professor at Parsons School of Design, NY and the founder of Of Course Global, a social innovation design consultancy, helping businesses be a force for good in society. Among their clients are: Capital One, Pfizer & Microsoft.
In her practice, Rinat combines principles from biomimicry & speculative design to create a cultural shift towards an egalitarian society by exploring the menstrual cycle and de-shaming it, which she explained further in her TED Talk: The Bloody Taboo With The Power To Change The World.
Her latest project 'What Would The Egg Do?' is a series of initiatives: an exhibition, documentary, education curriculum, business workshops and a book - all exploring how ‘nature-inspired solutions’ can lead to a healthier planet & gender equality. The exhibition opened for the 100th Anniversary of Women’s Equality Day on August 26th 2020.
Rinat holds a Bachelor's degree in Biotechnology Engineering from Ben-Gurion University, Israel
and an MFA in Design for Social Innovation from SVA, NY.
She mentors women from all over the world, helping them reclaim their power.
FION GUNN
Mixed Media Artist
Fion Gunn graduated from Crawford College of Art & Design, Ireland in and spent a post-graduate year at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts Supérieure de Nancy, France, she now lives and works in London.
She is an associate of Tate Exchange Liverpool and has won an award from Arts Council England for the creation of a ‘pathway’ artwork 'Odyssey: Explorations - The Digital Journey,' in collaboration with Tate and the Museum of Liverpool in 2019 . The artwork was showcased in August on Slavery Remembrance Day in Liverpool.
She is the first Irish artist to have a public art commission in China for the city of Zhangjiakou, in 2012 and is represented by Peking Art Associates in Beijing. Gunn’s diverse practice comprises 2D, 3D, sculpture, installation and multimedia projects. Her work features in private & corporate and state collections in UK, France, Poland, Ireland, USA & China, including most recently the Rosewood Residencies Guangzhou.
She has won multiple awards for her work from Arts Council England, Arts Council Ireland, Culture Ireland, Dublin, Cork & Belfast City Councils. She has been awarded Artist Residencies at RedGate Programme Beijing, Baltic Art Center Poland and Tate Exchange Liverpool. Gunn has exhibited at numerous galleries in Europe and China, including the A.P.T Gallery & Leyden Gallery in London, Au Médicis, Paris, WhiteBox , New York, Enjoy Museum & Inter Gallery 798, Tsinghua Academy of Arts & Crafts, Beijing among others.
Gunn was guest editor for the 2015 Spring Edition of ArtZip Contemporary Art Magazine (bilingual English/Chinese) writing on the theme of the artist as curator. She works with a wide network of international artists and has led panel discussions with high profile practitioners such as Shirin Neshat at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center, Oct 2015.
Her solo show 'Young Gunn' in November 2019, curated by Emily de Wolfe Pettit featured her 'Age of Exploration' artworks, this extensive series reflects her ongoing preoccupations and passions. Gunn' is a featured artist in 'On Paper Supreme' an international touring exhibition curated by Chang Feng and currently on show at Qingdao Tentimes Art Center, Qingdao, China.
Gunn has won multiple awards for her work from Arts Council England, Arts Council Ireland, Culture Ireland, City Councils of London, Dublin, Cork & Belfast, Irish Literature Exchange, Walcot Foundation. She founded Streatham Women’s Sewing Group CIC, was chair from 2009-15, working collaboratively as lead artist. The Group comprised women from the Somali & Horn of Africa Community in Streatham as well as Asian, North African, Refugee and low-income communities, its purpose was to reskill, promote inclusion and to promote well-being through arts & crafts.
Gunn has exhibited at numerous galleries in Europe and China - many of her projects are based in Beijing and Shanghai where she has also curated major collaborative exhibitions of Irish & Chinese contemporary art in an annual project called IRISH WAVE (2009-2016). https://www.facebook.com/pages/IRISH-WAVE/
Visit the artist's website - www.fiongunn.org
CATHERINE GOODMAN
Painter
Catherine Goodman (b. 1961) is an artist based in London, working between her London studios and Somerset.
She trained at London’s Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts, and the Royal Academy Schools, at which she won the Royal Academy Gold Medal in 1987.
Her painting of Antony Sutch won First Prize in the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in 2002, following which the Gallery commissioned her painting of Dame Cicely Saunders for its collection.
Goodman is represented by Marlborough Fine Art, at which she has exhibited since 2004.
She has had numerous solo exhibitions including Portraits from Life at the National Portrait Gallery in 2014 and the last house in the world at Marlborough Fine Art London in 2016; in 2019 she exhibited at Hauser & Wirth Somerset following five months as Artist in Residence, and at Marlborough Gallery New York with her solo exhibition, the light gets in.
Goodman’s paintings are held in numerous private and public collections including the National Portrait Gallery, which acquired her portrait of film director Stephen Frears for its 20th Century Collection; the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge and the Royal Collection Trust.
Central to her artistic process is the act of drawing from observation, whether from life, objects or the great masters and their works.
Goodman sees her role as an educator as being integral to her artistic identity and in 2000 she co-established the Royal Drawing School with HRH The Prince of Wales, to address the increasing absence of observational drawing in art education.
She has a longstanding interest in artists’ development and education, as well as the importance of drawing skills to underpin creative practice, both in fine art disciplines and more broadly in the creative industries.
She continues in her role as Founding Artistic Director and Academic Board Member and has been a Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order since 2014, for her services to the School.
YELENA POPOVA
Mixed Media Artist
Yelena Popova (b. 1978, Urals, Russia) lives and works in Nottingham. She studied at Moscow Art Theatre School and Byam Shaw at Central St Martins before graduating from MA Painting at the Royal College of Art in July 2011.
Popova is an artist who works across a wide range of media, including painting, video and installation. Reflecting her upbringing in the Urals, she is influenced by the tenets of Russian Constructivism, while often seeking to discuss the constant development of industrialism and the landscape of contemporary Capitalism. There is an important stress placed upon the theme of balance within her work, whether this is political, aesthetic or metaphysical.
Popova’s work consists of contrasts between latent and manifest meanings, shape and content, form and material. Her documentary films, such as Particulate Matter, provide a relatively concrete exploration of the universal relationship between Capitalism and Industrialisation, across cultural intersections. The documentary’s aesthetic is evocative of Russian Constructivism and Soviet Montage.
Complementing the more supraliminal documentaries, her linen panels consist of ethereal forms, reminiscent of the opalescent smog so often spawned by the industrialised city. They are an abstraction of the tangible, while maintaining a robust tactility; the images are suggestive of Turner, however her practice more accurately aligns with tenets of Russian Modernism.
There is an intrinsic sense of balance encapsulated in the fluid contours, cut short by the restrictive rectangular canvas, and then recaptured by round supplementary satellite panels. This produces a symbolic contrast between the eternity of the circle and the finitude of the rectangle. Materiality is also explored rigorously; the use of linen, overlaid with pale washes, creates tactility, while the aqueous ethereality of the washes seems virtually nonexistent.
Yelena Popova primarily focuses upon matter and materiality, using a wide variety of media to open up discourses to her audience. She creates discussions based upon the systematic relationship between objects in Industrial and Capitalist cultures, which is reinforced by the powerful contrasts present in her work and the equilibrium they manage to maintain.
RENATE BERTLMANN
Mixed Media Artist
Renate Bertlmann, born in 1943 in Vienna, studied at the Academy of Arts in Oxford in 1962/63 and subsequently at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna until 1970. After graduating in Painting and Restoration, she was a lecturer at the Department of Conservation and Technology at the Academy until 1982. She lives and works in Vienna. In her work Bertlmann explores representations of roles and bodies, questioning gender relationships by discussing subjects like pornography, sexuality, violence, Eros, and hierarchy. Her works are particularly characterized by a provocative, ironic approach. She has been a member of the Vienna Secession since 1993 and a coeditor of the magazine [sic!] – Forum für feministische Gangarten since 1994. In 2007, she received the Prize of the City of Vienna and in 2017,
the Grand Austrian State Prize.
Visit her website: www.bertlmann.com
Renate Bertlmann is represented by Galerie Steinek / www.galerie.steinek.at
and Richard Saltoun Gallery / www.richardsaltoun.com
ANJ SMITH
Painter
Anj Smith (born 1978) is a British artist. She was born in Kent and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and at Goldsmiths College in London. Her paintings are often on a small scale and highly detailed. Smith has exhibited at institutions around the world, including Mostyn, Llandudno, UK; Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere, Finland; Bluecoat, Liverpool, UK; Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville TN, and La Maison Rouge, Paris, France.
CLAUDETTE JOHNSON
Painter and Mixed Media Artist
Claudette Johnson (born 1959) is a British visual artist. She is known for her large-scale drawings of Black women and involvement with the BLK Art Group. She was described by Modern Art Oxford as "one of the most accomplished figurative artists working in Britain today."
MELISSA BALMAIN
Humorist, journalist, and teacher
Melissa Balmain edits Light, America's longest-running journal of comic poetry, and teaches at the University of Rochester. Her poems have appeared in The American Bystander, American Life in Poetry, The Hopkins Review, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Mezzo Cammin, The New Criterion, The New Verse News, Poetry Daily, Rattle, The Spectator (UK), Verse Daily, The Washington Post, and assorted anthologies; her prose in The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney's, and Success. Her poetry collection Walking In on People (winner of the Able Muse Book Award) is often assumed by online shoppers to be some kind of porn. Twitter handle: @MelissaBalmain. Website: melissabalmain.com.
For more information, please contact: melissa.balmain@gmail.com
JULIE HEFFERNAN
Painter
Julie Heffernan is an American painter whose artwork has been described by the writer Rebecca Solnit as "a new kind of history painting" and by The New Yorker as "ironic rococo surrealism with a social-satirical twist." Writing for The New York Sun, art critic David Cohen says of Heffernan’s exhibition: "These paintings are a hybrid of genres and styles, mixing allegory, portraiture, history painting, and still life, while in title they are all presented as self-portraits." Portraiture is a dominant subject in Heffernan’s painting, even while she also reflects on environmental, (art) historical, feminist, literary, social, and political subjects.
Heffernan was raised in Northern California, received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking and painting from University of California at Santa Cruz, and earned a Master of Fine Arts at Yale School of Art. She is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University and currently lives in New York.
In 2011, Heffernan was elected a National Academician to the National Academy of Design in New York and in 2014, to the Board of Governors. She is a 2017 Fellow of the BAU Institute at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France; was awarded the Meridian Scholar Artist-In-Residence Fellowship from the University of Tampa in Florida and was the featured artist for the 2017 MacDowell Colony. In 2013, Heffernan was awarded a Milton And Sally Avery Fellowship at MacDowell and in 2012, she was invited to be the Lee Ellen Fleming Artist-In-Residence at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. In 2010, she was the Commencement Speaker for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and in 2009, she was the featured artist at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, a Fulbright-Hayes grant to Berlin, Heffernan was also a nominee for the "Anonymous Was A Woman" award. Since 1999, Heffernan has had more than 50 solo exhibitions at museums and other venues across the United States and abroad. Her work is represented in 25 museum and institutional collections. She has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2005.
For more information, please contact: jheffernan7@gmail.com
VICTORIA MANGANIELLO
Multimedia Artist
Victoria Manganiello (Brooklyn, NY) has been featured in Hyperallergic, The New York Times, Boulin ArtInfo, Forbes, and Architectural Digest, among others. Victoria has received multiple international, recognized grants, commissions, and residency appointments including from Wave Farm, S&R Foundation, Center for Craft, The Wallstreet Journal, Harvest Works, Silver Art Projects, and AIR Gallery. She has exhibited her work internationally including in Romania, Bulgaria, Taiwan, Croatia, and Italy and throughout the USA including at the Tang Museum, Museum of Art and Design, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, The Armory Center, and Queens Museum. She is also an adjunct professor at NYU and Parson’s the New School. Exploring the intersections between materiality, technology, geography, and storytelling, Victoria’s multi-disciplinary and installation work, abstract paintings, and kinetic sculptures are made meticulously with hand-woven textiles using hand-spun yarn and hand-mixed natural and synthetic color dyes alongside mechanical alternatives and modern technologies. Victoria's website can be found here.
For more information, please contact: vkmanganiello@gmail.com
INGRID POLLARD
Multimedia Artist
Mixed-media artist and researcher, Dr Ingrid Pollard uses digital, analogue and alternative photographic processes, also incorporating printmaking, image-text and artist books, installation, video and audio. Pollard studied Film and Video at the London College of Printing and MA in Photographic Studies, University of Derby and holds a PhD from the University of Westminster.
She was one of twenty founding members of Autograph (the Association of Black Photographers), and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. In 2018, Pollard was the Inaugural Stuart Hall Research Fellow in the same year. She has worked as an artist-in-residence at a number of organisations, including Project Row Houses, Houston Texas, US, 2004; Croydon College of Art, 2011; the Lea Valley and Cumbria National Parks and Glasgow Women’s Library in 2019/20. Her work has been exhibited widely, including Tate Britain, Victoria & Albert Museum & Photographers Gallery, London; NGBK, Berlin; the Caribbean Cultural Centre, New York; the National Art Gallery of Barbados; and Camerawork, San Francisco. In 2019, she received the BALTIC Artist Award and was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award.
Ingrid Pollard is presently in residence at Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL), as part of Glasgow International 2020. Having taken part in GI2018 with Deep Down Body Thirst, curated by Radclyffe Hall, Ingrid returns to Glasgow and the festival with a new exhibition exploring Lesbian history and culture.
For more information, please contact: http://www.ingridpollard.com/contact.html
NAOMIE KREMER
Multimedia Artist
Naomie Kremer is a painter and multi-media artist. Her video based work includes painting animations, text animations and video based set design for opera, theater and dance. Incarnation, a video and sound installation of nude video portraits, was visited by 2200 people at the Piscine de la Butte aux Cailles on the night of October 5-6, part of Nuit Blanche, Paris, 2019. Her video Rudimentary Moves was exhibited in January, 2016 on the giant outdoor screen at the opening of the redesigned Berkeley Art Museum.
“Paint and video are my primary media – separately and together. Though largely abstract, my paintings incorporate figurative and architectural elements, letterforms and references to nature. Orchestrating detail, color, and scale, I use paint for its ability to describe an otherwise invisible world, eliciting a physical response that draws the viewer into the world of the work. Video structures the viewer’s time in a way a painting can’t, showing thought unfolding. I use video much like paint – layering, overlapping and manipulating imagery till the source is transformed and no longer identifiable.”
Kremer’s work for the stage includes an all-video set for the Berkeley Opera production of Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle; Light Moves, a collaboration with Margaret Jenkins Dance Company; The Secret Garden, a world premiere opera co-commissioned by San Francisco Opera and Cal Performances; a video set for the production of the opera Alcina, by George Frederick Handel, performed in September 2016 at the Crusaders Courtyard in Acre, Israel; Tristan and Isolde, part of the Isolde Project by Claude Heater Foundation, performed in San Francisco and Luslawice, Poland; and Lucia Berlin Stories, performed in Paris by Word for Word Theater Company.
Her work is in many public and private collections including the US Embassy in Beijing, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Magnes Museum, and the University of California Berkeley Art Museum. She’s had solo exhibitions in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Paris and Dusseldorf. Her painting animations have been featured on the Apple Pro website for their unusual use of the animation program Motion. Born in Tel Aviv, Israel and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Kremer has lived in the Bay Area since 1977, as well as Paris, France, since 2001. Kremer received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from California College of the Arts in 1993. She has taught and lectured widely, including at the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts, the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford University, and the Syracuse Univeristy program in Florence, Italy. She is represented by Modernism Gallery, San Francisco and Von Fraunberg Gallery, Dusseldorf. www.naomiekremer.com
For more information, please contact: naomie.kremer@gmail.com
SILVIA GAMBRIONE
Multimedia Artist
Silvia Giambrone was born in 1981. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome (2002- 2006). She has held residencies throughout Europe and USA and been awarded several prizes over the past five years. She has recently been awarded the VAF prize, the most important prize for young Italian artists. Giambrone, who both lives and works between Rome and London, works about both the physical and invisible evidences of the strong connection between violence ad the ‘subjectification’ process.
Some of her exhibitions include: Pandora's Boxes, CCCB Museum, Madrid (2009); Eurasia, Mart Museum, Rovereto (2009); Moscow Biennale: Qui vive? (2010); Flyers, Oncena Biennal de la Havana (2012); Re-Generation, Macro Museum, Roma (2012); Mediterranea 16 (2013); Let it go, American Academy in Rome (2013); Critica in arte, MAR Museum, Ravenna (2014); Ciò che non siamo, ciò che non vogliamo, MAG Museum, Riva del Garda (2014); A terrible love of war, Kaunas Bienale, Lituania (2015); Every passion borders on the chaotic, Villa Croce Museum, Genova (2016); W Women in Italian Design, Triennale Design Museum, Milano (2016); Archeologia domestica Vol. I, IIC, Colonia (2016); Time is out of Joint, La Galleria Nazionale, Roma (2017); Corpo a corpo, La Galleria Nazionale, Rome (2017); Terra mediterranea: in action, NiMAC, Nicosia, Cyprus (2017); Il corpo è un indumento fragile, Museo del 900, Florence (2018); Young Italians 1968 – 2018, Italian Institute of Culture, New York City (2018); SHE DEVIL Remix, Pecci Museum, Prato (2018); Vaf Prize, Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Vaf Foundation (2019); Wall-eyes. Looking at Italy and Africa, Keynes Art Mile, Johannesburg (2019); Donne. Corpo e immagine tra simbolo e rivoluzione, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Rome (2019); VII Premio Fondazione VAF, Stadtgalerie Kiel, Germany (2019); Italia. I racconti (in)visibli, Santiago del Cile, Museo Cultural Las condes, Cile (2019); Feminism in Italian contemporary art, Richard Saltoun Gallery, London (2019); Sovvertimenti, Museo Novecento, Florence (2019); Level 0, Museo del Novecento, Milan (2020); I say I, La Galleria Nazionale, Roma (2020).
She works with Richard Saltoun Gallery in London, Stefania Miscetti Studio in Rome and with Galleria Marcolini in Forlì.
For more information, please contact: silvia.giambrone@gmail.com
Multimedia Artist
Anita Glesta's work encompasses numerous approaches from object making to time based installation sculpture, including digital technologies. Recent video projections explore the built urban environment through outside projections. The project WATERSHED was a video installation projected on the face of the Royal National Theater on the Thames, London in 2015 during the Paris Climate Change conference. In 2017, WATERSHED was projected as an immersive video on the enormous sidewalk of the Brooklyn Public Library, Red Hook in commemoration of the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Sandy. Other immersive video installation venues have included The Customs House at Ellis Island, Big Screen Plaza, NY, The New Museum “Ideas City Festival” and, the Princeton Arts Council.
Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions internationally and her solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow (MOCAK), the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology, Beijing, the Hudson River Museum, Black and White Gallery, Museo de Arte y Antropologia, La Paz, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, White Columns, Five Myles Gallery and others.
Glesta’s permanent public art commissions include two commissions in the city of Sydney for the Yurong Water Gardens as well as the General Administration Services Art in Architecture for her permanently installed integrated landscape at the Federal Census Bureau building in Suitland, Md.
A recipient of many grants and awards including the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, New York State Council of the Arts New Media, Pollock/Krasner, Puffin Foundation, Glesta’s work has appeared in many journals, magazine and online reviews including BOMB, Hyperallergic, Studio International, Sculpture Magazine, Art in America, the Daily News, Art Daily and The New York Times and many more.
Anita Glesta lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
For more information, contact: anitaglesta4@gmail.com
Author
Bex E Brian is the author of the novel, Promiscuous Unbound, Grove Press. And, has a new book entitled Radius coming out on Spuyten Duyvil Press.
She has written about cooking, among many other things, for various publications, including Salon.com and Eat, Darling, Eat.
She spends her days writing, cooking and, dancing around the apartment until she feels the inevitable twinge from some muscle.
In the evenings, with her husband, also a writer, they try to parse and understand the madness and confusion, which is our present-day reality. It is then that a cocktail is deemed necessary before she serves whatever concoction she dreamt up during the day.
For more information, contact: bexsubduction@gmail.com
Multimedia Artist
Born in 1975 in Silesia, Poland, Anna Kott studied at the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts, Poland. Kott’s
work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at, amongst others, Kunsthalle CCA Andratx, Andratx, Mallorca (2019/2020), Bruton Museum (2019), Ferenczy Muzeumi Centrum Szentendre, Hungary (2016); Museum Jerke, Recklinghausen, Germany (2016); Museum of Architecture, Wroclaw, Poland (2015); Kunsthalle Jesuitenkirche, Aschaffenburg, Germany; Kunsthaus Apolda, Apolda, Germany (2015); Museumsverein Stade, Stade, Germany; Polish Institute, Berlin (2013); Polish Institute, Düsseldorf, Germany (2011); Museo para la Identidad Nacional, Tegucigalpa, Honduras (2008); El Salvador Museum of Art, San Salvador, El Salvador (2007).
Anna Kott currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
For more information, contact: anna@annakott.com
What uniquely inspires and motivates my painting is a very special feeling of living inside the minds of the most amazing painters in history as they held a brush and placed their strokes on canvas. I “restore” a masterpiece of the past by interpreting and reinterpreting it for what I feel needs to be said today.
After graduating CCNY in 1966, I was trained as a conservator of old master paintings at the Museum of Capodimonte in Naples, Italy. There I had the opportunity to work on wonderful Old Master paintings such as Titian, Ribera, and Caravaggio to mention just a few. I studied and learned how they were physically made and observed features in the brushwork as a guide to in-painting missing areas. I learned about the provenance of paintings and how over time paintings were subjected to different methods, styles. and motives of restoration (like removing a cod piece or altering a nipple). In 1972 I returned to New York.
Painter and American Art Restorer
Recently, I created a series of 12 paintings entitled “about Being a Girl,” inspired by interviews I did with high school girls about their concerns and aspirations. Each of the 12 panels is a different theme such as love, bullying, politics, gender identification, and so on. The fictional female figure (heads culled from 19th century paintings and photographs and the bodies from artist studio models) are placed against a background of symbols that represent the theme. Emblazoned in text next to the young women are quotes from their inspiring interviews. Just their voices alone inspired me to create an eleven minute animation film of the paintings based on the audio interviews while using the imagery from these paintings.
I am presently living and working in New York City.
For more information, contact: kathleengilje@gmail.com
Methodologies of conservation have given me the means to express my thoughts, feelings and passion for justice in the world we live in today based on a history of truths and lies. One example, is painting in heavy white lead paint a vital narrative or contemporary interpretation about an Old Master which then makes it possible for an x-ray of the painting to show my imagery, even after I have painted over it. This narrative becomes a ghost beneath the surface and this ghost-like image has historically been called a pentimento. In my rendition of Susanna and the Elders, Restored, after Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting, I painted Artemisia’s own story of sexual abuse beneath that of Susanna’s which we can see in the x-ray of the painting. In this “pentimento” she physically struggles to fight off her assailant with a knife. We know this story of betrayal and rape to be factual because we have existing court records and it is no accident she chose this subject. The painting, and x-ray on a light box are exhibited next to each other (Susanna and the Elders, Restored, 1998, collection Addison Gallery of American Art).
Art Writer and Cultural Critic
Eleanor Heartney is a New York based art writer and cultural critic who has been writing about art since 1981. She is Contributing Editor to Art in America and Artpress and has written extensively on contemporary art issues for other magazines such as Artnews, Art and Auction, The New Art Examiner, the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Heartney was the 1992 recipient of the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism and has also received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Asian Cultural Council.
A collection of Heartney’s essays was published in 1997 by Cambridge University Press under the title ‘Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads’. Other books include ‘Postmodernism’, published by the Tate Gallery Publishers, ‘Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art’ published by Midmarch Arts Press and soon to be re-released by Silver Hollow Press, ‘Defending Complexity’, published by Hard Press editions, and ‘Art and Today, a survey of contemporary art from the 1980s to the present’ published by Phaidon in 2008.
Heartney is past President of AICA-USA, the American section of the International Art Critics Association. In 2008 she was honoured by the French government as a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Heartney is the chair of the ‘Future Feminism’ session at our upcoming ‘Celebrating Female Agency in the Arts’ conference. Heartney will be joined by fellow speakers, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal and Sue Scott. Their session will look forward by looking back.
For more information, contact: eleanor_heartney@yahoo.com
