Sue Chenoweth: Curated by Susan Krane

c u e a r t f o u n d at i o n

February 3 - March 12, 2005 Curated by Susan Krane

S U E C H E N OW E T H

We are honored and grateful to present this exhibition generously curated by Susan Krane. Ms. Krane, the Director of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona, has chosen artist Sue Chenoweth. Ms. Krane’s appreciation of Ms. Chenoweth’s work demonstrates how the Foundation’s discretionary process allows differing forms of expression an opportunity to be seen.

CUE appreciates that geographic location can sometimes limit an artist's exhibition possibilities elsewhere, thus CUE is pleased to offer Ms. Chenoweth the opportunity for her first solo exhibition in New York. Ms. Krane and we, together, wish her a future of fulfillment and success.

c u r at o r’s s t at e m e n t

Sue Chenoweth makes art with urgency. Her scratchy, idiosyncratic drawings slip back and forth between abstract meanderings of the hand and representational musings of the mind. Images morph and dissolve at the edges, emerge from and submerge into the ground, as if spun from a surreal vortex. Her art sometimes seem to come from a place of sophisticated artistic awa re n e ss , confident enough to throw caution to the wind. At other times, it instead seems blatantly naïve, an affect of raw luck. Chenoweth balances on this knife’s edge: she trusts and tends the self-propelled life of her art.

“I had to draw in order to survive,” she explains. Artmaking, for Chenoweth, is a place where the compulsions of the mind find purpose and focus. She deliberately strives to give up conscious control—no small feat for her. Each painting, however, remains a collection of minute, labored decisions.

She will talk in depth about choosing to turn a line here, or to drop a puddle of paint there. “I travel with them when I paint or draw them. Nothing is random.

It’s exhausting: I am riding that edge of its death,” she explains.

Chenoweth’s obsessive pictorial scrutiny belies her training and natural facility. She has drawn since she was a toddler and was raised with art.

One grandmother was a painter, the other a weaver. As a child, she was given all the art books and supplies she wanted, contrary to other zones of family frugality. She had to turn down admission to California Institute of Arts due to illness and later attended Arizona State University. Her work rarely found favor

at a library sale, The New Testament: A Pictorial Archive from NineteenthCentury Sources 1 and later discovered the work of Piranesi, which she arranged to view in the print room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She became fascinated with the printmaker's confident and incisive line —a biting kind of drawing in her eyes.

These visual inputs fused in her mind and she launched on the series “The Rich Man,” in which she freely adapts 19th-century biblical illustrations of the Book of Luke. Chenoweth juxtaposes her appropriated religious iconography with frothy, doodling apparitions of fancy dresses. Desire twitches nervously in these works. Rather than make moralizing rants, Chenoweth wanted to depict the acuteness of such material enticements without resorting to picturing the object per se. Here, the state of wanting is an entrapment, but one that takes on a natural organic status. Dresses become glittering jewels, exotic bug-like chrysalises and vaporous spots of seductive color.

Chenoweth, operating far from the center of current critical discourse, takes risks of another, personal sort. “I go where my fear is,“ she says, “The fear now is drawing representationally. I want to capture the essence of a thing.

How do you draw the sound of a bird singing before the sun comes up, when you are half awake?” And so Chenoweth’s style is now willfully experimental— intense yet funky. Her art is disarmingly honest and welcomingly without pretense.

with the faculty, most of whom considered it akin to outsider art—messy and uncritical. Although she admires the power of visionary art (most recently that

Susan Krane

of Henry Darger), Chenoweth is anything but unschooled. She has long taught high school art and art history and is a regular participant in the growing Phoenix-area art scene. She has, however, a hard-won gift of self-awareness, which validates an off-beat style that fits her like a glove.

During her recent stay in New York, Chenoweth was fascinated by the sheer excess of the city and high-end consumption, particularly high fashion.

She was enthralled by designer shop windows and by her surprisingly intense desire for such finery—for “clothes like cotton candy that would melt in your mouth.” Chenoweth was also perusing a collection of old prints she had bought

Don Rice, ed. The New Testament: A Pictorial Archive from Nineteenth-Century Sources (New York: Dover Publications, Inc), 1986.

a r t i s t ’ s s tat e m e n t

Painting becomes the terrain I travel. As the images ebb and flow, so do I. The marks are completely instinctive and unconscious and function as a type of reciprocal motion between the work and myself. These visible traces serve as a way of recording a primitive level of order. Even though each brushstroke and drawn line is completely subconscious, there is a profound sense of orderly direction to my art. Each mark is deliberately considered. The paintings are built on a scaffolding of Art History and all things formal. This is the stable base that allows me to try to employ a true artistic dichotomy. How does one think and not think at the same time? I want the viewer to experience the bits of feelings we all have behind our thoughts. I want them to remember things without language and explore their primal sensory essence. This essence is that which makes us human. Painting is about adaptation and change, transgression and redemption. It is the grand tale of ‘Every Man’ told through the language of drawing. I want to understand that language and be able to draw as easily as I breathe.

Sue Chenoweth

THE GRAND TALE, 2003 Acrylic, graphite, ink, paper and letraset on panel, 30’ x 30’

THE RICH MAN CO U N TS HIS MONEY, THE RICH MAN DIES, 2004 Acrylic, graphite, ink, paper and letraset on panel, 30’ x 30’

THE RICH MAN AND THE UNJUST JUDGE, 2004 Acrylic, graphite, ink, paper and letraset on panel, 30’ x 29 1/2"

LICKING RICH MAN'S WARE, 2004 Acrylic, graphite and ink on panel, 26 1/2" x 23 3/4"

THE RICH MAN'S WIFE, 2004 Acrylic and graphite on panel, 26 1/2" x 23 3/4"

AT THE RICH MAN'S DOOR, 2004 Acrylic, graphite and ink on panel, 26 1/2" x 23 3/4 "

D R OWNING IN ROSES, 2004 Acrylic, graphite and ink on panel, 26 1/2" x 23 3/4"

E M B A R R ASSED TO WANT RICH WOMAN'S CLOTHES I, 2004 Gouache, graphite and letraset on paper, 7 1/2 " x 9 1/2 "

E M B A R R ASSED TO WANT RICH WOMAN'S CLOTHES II, 2004 Gouache, graphite and letraset on paper, 7 1/2 " x 9 1/2 "

E M B A R R ASSED TO WANT RICH WOMAN'S CLOTHES III, 2004 Gouache, graphite and letraset on paper, 7 1/2" x 9 1/2 "

LOOKING AT THE RICH MAN'S WARE I, 2004 Gouache and graphite on paper, 9 1/2 " x 7 1/2 "

a r t i s t ' s b i o g ra p h y

c u r at o r ' s b i o g r a p h y

Sue Chenoweth was born in Plainview, Texas in 1953. It was in Texas that she

Susan Krane is Director of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art,

began drawing with white rocks on sidewalks around the age of two. After

Arizona. She was Director of the Art Museum, University of Colorado at

moving to Phoenix, Arizona at the age of four she began feverishly setting up

Boulder (1996-2001); curator of modern and co n te m p o rary art at the High

drawing systems which included shorthand formulas for sketching. At age 14

Museum, Atlanta (1987-1995); curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (1979-

she began to seriously study painting on her own by copying the works of

1987) and a fellow at the Walker Art Center (1978-79). Among her exhibitions

Winslow Homer. From age fourteen to eighteen she worked under the direction

and publications are Hollis Frampton: Recollections/Recreations (MIT Press,

of Marlyne Jones, an Arizona artist and teacher who trained Chenoweth to

1987); Albright-Knox Art Gallery: The Painting and Sculpture Collection: Acquisitions since 1972 (Hudson Hills Press, 1987), Lynda Benglis: Dual Natures (University of Washington Press, 1992); Max Weber: The Cubist Decade (University of Washington Press, 1992); Alison Saar: Fertile Ground ( 1 9 92 ) ; Equal Rights and Justice (1994); Out of Order: Mapping Social Space (2000); Lesley Dill (2002); and Let's Walk West: Brad Kahlhamer (University of Washington Press, 2004). Krane received her BA from Carleton College; her MA from Columbia University and her MBA from the University of Colorado. She has served on the faculties of SUNY Buffalo, Emory University and the University of Colorado at Boulder, and is particularly interested in cro ss - d i s c i p l i n a r y approaches to contemporary art.

understand the value of drawing on a deep level. “I feel that I learned the important things during that time,” she says, “I began using drawing as a way of ordering and relating.” Sue went on to re ce i ve both her BFA and MFA from Arizona State University and is currently teaching Drawing and Painting at Metropolitan Art Institute, a College Preparatory High School in Phoenix. “I feel like I am on a mission,” says Chenoweth, “In teaching, I want to perpetuate the legacy of drawing that was given to me as a youth. I want people to understand the importance of markmaking before that language is lost forever.”

c u e a r t fo u n d a t i o n m i s s i o n s tat e m e n t

CUE Art Foundation, a non-profit organization, provides educational programs

B OA R D O F D I RE CT O R S

for young artists and aspiring art professionals in New York and from around

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the country. These programs draw on the unique community of artists, critics,

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and educators brought together by the Foundation's season of exhibitions,

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public lectures, and its in-gallery studio program. Gallery internships and

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stipends afford the next generation of art pro fe ssionals intimate, working knowledge of the art-making and exhibition pro ce sses. CUE's 2000 sq. ft.

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gallery and offices, located in New York's Chelsea gallery district, serves as the

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base for the various educational programs conducted by CUE.

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The Foundation's exhibition season gives unknown or under-recog-

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nized artists professional exposure comparable to that offered by neighboring

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commercial galleries, without the usual financial restraints. CUE does not

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promote a particular school of artistic practice or regional bias; we only require

B r u ce Fe rg u s o n

that exhibiting artists must either not ha ve had a solo exhibition in a commer-

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cial venue, or have received minimal recent public exposure.

Dana Hoey

CUE's Advisory Council, an honorary group of artists and leading figures from the arts education, applied arts, art history, and literary communi-

G A L L E RY D I RE C TO R

ties, has the responsibility of selecting exhibition curators. The curators, in turn,

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nominate artists to exhibit at CUE, and continue to play a role throughout the exhibition process, helping the artists catalogue their work for exhibition. Both

G A L L E R Y C O O R D I N AT O R

the Advisory Council and the exhibition curators actively participate in the

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public lectures and educational programs.

G A L L E R Y A S S I S TA N T

Beatrice Wolert-Weese

A L L A R T WO R K Š SU E C H E N OW E T H C ATA LO G D E S I G N : E L I Z A B E T H E L L I S