Fred Eversley & Mary Weatherford - ADAA: The Art Show - Selected Press

Fred Eversley Selected Press The Art Show November 4 – 7, 2021

press@davidkordanskygallery.com www.davidkordanskygallery.com T: 323.935.3030 F: 323.935.3031

Haddad, Natalie, “Fred Eversley’s Joyful Light,” Hyperallergic.com, May 1, 2021

Fred Eversley’s Joyful Light

Eversley’s parabolic sculptures draw us into a self-aware and ever-shifting encounter with space and perceptual phenomena.

by Natalie Haddad | May 1, 2021

Installation view, Fred Eversley: Recent Sculpture at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (all images unless otherwise noted: Photo by Jeff McLane / Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery)

LOS ANGELES — Fred Eversley has been making art for more than 50 years. Recent Sculpture at David Kordansky Gallery is by no means a survey — its 15 sculptures all date from 2018 to 2020 and focus primarily on the form that has most occupied him over the years, the parabolic lens. But the exhibition’s concentration allows the breathtaking effects of his work to come through all the better.

A pioneering figure in California’s Light and Space movement, Eversley left a career in aerospace engineering for art; he moved to Southern California to work at Wyle Laboratories, where he designed and constructed testing facilities for NASA. As a result, he brought to his art practice technical expertise as well as a rigorous scientific grasp of energy.

The works in Recent Sculpture — 10 parabolic lenses and five horizontal lenses that resemble shallow bowls — continue the artist’s longtime fascination with the parabola and its optical and acoustical properties. He uses a centrifuge to create his translucent forms and achieves their luminous surfaces through repeated sanding and polishing.

The results are mesmerizing. The works seem at once organic and synthetic, material and immaterial in the way they change with the vicissitudes of light, seeming, at times, to exist wholly through reflections. The crystalline sheen makes the hardened polyester look as if it is suspended between liquid and solid states. Eversley has expanded his palette from his original magenta, yellow, and cyan, with some works composed of two or three gradated colors. In “Untitled (parabolic lens)” ([1969] 2020), the colors radiate out in concentric circles, from white at the center to light blue, green, indigo, and black, with some variation depending on the light. From certain angles red or yellow hues flicker in and out. The soft gray at the center of a black lens suggests the moon shrouded by fog and darkness.

Haddad, Natalie, “Fred Eversley’s Joyful Light,” Hyperallergic.com, May 1, 2021

all images: Installation view, Fred Eversley: Recent Sculpture at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

Haddad, Natalie, “Fred Eversley’s Joyful Light,” Hyperallergic.com, May 1, 2021

Installation view, Fred Eversley: Recent Sculpture at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

The exhibition’s layout enhances the kaleidoscopic effects. The five horizontal lenses sit on a central table bookended by the parabolic lenses, which are displayed at varying angles on two long platforms; from almost any angle, the center of a lens captures the distorted images of the sculptures it faces, refracted onto its concave interior walls.

Some sculptures captured by the lens appear to float in space; looking through the deep royal blue of one work feels like staring into the cosmos or an oceanic abyss. The convex forms of the horizontal lenses create the opposite effect, saturated with color at the center and radiating a halo of light around the edges, like a solar eclipse.

In contrast to the work of many of his Light and Space and Minimalist contemporaries, Eversley’s sculptures are relatively small. The parabolic lenses are under 20 inches in diameter and around six inches deep, and the horizontal lenses are just slightly larger in diameter.

Because of their intimate size, they neither tower over us, like John McCracken’s monoliths or Larry Bell’s tinted glass walls, for example, nor immerse us, like James Turrell’s light installations, but rather draw us into a self-aware and ever-shifting encounter with space and perceptual phenomena. Eversley has called his work “kinetic art” in the sense that it prompts us to move, but the label doesn’t capture the joy of the experience.

Eversley’s virtuosity is matched by an understated wit. The correspondence between the parabolic lens and the eye can conjure associations with surveillance or panopticism, underscored by the layering of our own reflections with the distorted views and reflections of others.

Likewise, their associations with science, technology, and space travel evoke dystopic science fiction (or reality) at times: A ruby red lens viewed head-on almost recalls HAL 9000, the sentient computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Eversley’s centrifuge is fashioned from a turntable once used to making atomic bomb casings. (Critic Claire Barliant notes in a Bomb magazine review the rebelliousness of rerouting doomsday technology toward art.)

Yet Recent Sculpture makes a strong case for Light and Space, and Eversley’s elegant, jewel-like sculptures, as especially welcome, essential even, in times of unrest. His artworks provide a space for curiosity and play. They embody “Light and Space” by creating an atmosphere of lightness unencumbered by our worldly realm.

Barrie, Lita, “Fred Eversley’s Ethereal Kinetic Parabolas at David Kordansky Gallery,” WhiteHotMagazine.com, April 22, 2021

Fred Eversley’s Ethereal Kinetic Parabolas at David Kordansky Gallery

By Lita Barrie | April 22, 2021

Installation view, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles: Fred Eversley: Recent Sculpture, March 20 - May 1, 2021. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Fred Eversley is an artist who defies categorization: an aerospace engineer turned sculptor who creates art with the intellect of a scientist, the inventiveness of an engineer and the perception of an artist. He turns invisible energies around us into visible beauty we can see ourselves within, as elements of that art. Eversley’s lifelong obsession with the energy of light began when he was 13 and read that the parabola first postulated by Isaac Newton is the only shape that concentrates all forms of energy into a single focal point. Since then, Eversley has dedicated his life to exploring the energy of light, which places him in the lineage of the most brilliant minds in physics, philosophy, poetry and art. After Einstein made his discovery that light is “the quintessence of the universe,” he said, “for the rest of my life I want to reflect on what light is.” Eversley has more affinity with the history of expansive minds who are obsessed with light than myopic art cliques and is more likely to read about solar eclipses and black holes than what is trending in the art world.

As the son of an engineer and the grandson of a photographer who also loved electronics, Eversley already had an amateur radio communications license when he was seven. As a young teenager, he experimented with creating various parabolic forms—first with spinning a pan of water around a vertical axis on an old phonograph turntable. When he later became an artist, he remembered these teenage experiments and replicated the same process using plastic—and it created a perfect parabolic form.

Eversley’s iconic parabolas have mesmerized a broad audience for over 50 years, and are receiving renewed interest today from both the worlds of art and science. Eversley understands the quantum physics behind making kinetic sculptures that come to life in our subjective experience. Moving around these finite works completes the aesthetic equation that creates refracted light - which is infinite, like light itself. In Recent Sculptures at David Kordansky Gallery, viewers can see reflections of themselves and the other sculptures in the gallery through the parabolic lenses. Instagram is flooded with images of enthusiastic viewers taking selfies of their reflections inside these parabolic lenses which gives these interactive works a further life.

As Eversley explains, the parabolic shape is “a concentration of visual energy to create an object of contemplation that transcends everything—black, white, old, young, educated, non-educated—because people can react, no matter what their background.” As the only artist of color in the West Coast Light and Space movement, Eversley has never been interested in making political art, because he is focused on creating a transcendent experience. He is also the only artist to explore the kinetic possibilities of the parabolic form - which is mainly used for telescope reflectors made from ground glass. As natural light interacts with Eversley’s cast resin lenses, the sharp surface edge refracts it like a prism and the curved layers of color come into view in a shifting experience of color that changes from different viewing angles.

In the 1970s, Eversley used the same three colors— violet, amber and blue— for his transparent pieces. He also made opaque pieces using white and black sometimes mixed together to create gray. Now he has expanded his color palette by incorporating cyan, magenta and yellow in different combinations and densities which can change from opacity to complete transparency. He only recently began experimenting with other colors and pearlescent powders to create more luminous surfaces. Eversley’s work is not brand art because it is handmade, not prefabricated, with tools he invented and each parabola has different chromatic effects created from his labor-intensive polishing technique.

Barrie, Lita, “Fred Eversley’s Ethereal Kinetic Parabolas at David Kordansky Gallery,” WhiteHotMagazine.com, April 22, 2021

Fred Eversley, Untitled (parabolic lens), (1969) 2020. 3-layer, 3-color cast polyester, 19 1/8 x 19 1/8 x 5 3/8 in. Photography: Jeff McLane. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

Fred Eversley, Untitled (parabolic lens), (1974) 2020, cast polyester, 19 1/2 x 19 1/2 x 6 3/8 in. Photography: Jeff McLane. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

Eversley’s trajectory as an artist is unique, and this has allowed him to communicate the wonder of his explorations of light, to a wider audience. He did not study art history or attend art school; rather, he went to Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) where he studied electrical engineering. When he moved to Venice in 1964, he was a senior project engineer supervising design and construction of high-intensity acoustic and vibration test laboratories at NASA facilities.

He became friends with artists John McCracken, Larry Bell and Ed Moses before he became an artist and as the first technologist of the A.R.C. (the Aesthetic Research Center) he started to collaborate with some of the artists. After a car accident which left him disabled on crutches for a year, he began to explore making art himself using polyester resins. It was during this time, in early 1969, that his friend John Altoon died and his widow gave Eversley his studio, designed by Frank Gehry. He had shared a studio with Charlie Mattox making tiny works when Robert Rauschenberg encouraged him to forget LA and go to New York to find a gallery.

With nothing to lose and a lot of chutzpah, Eversley hit the streets of New York with an attaché case of little sculptures and began approaching gallerists in early 1970.

Serendipitously, he met his old friend Marcia Tucker, who offered him a one man show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. After securing a second solo show at Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago, he returned to California and was soon invited to be in an important group show at Pace Gallery, A Decade of California Color (1970), a solo show at OK Harris Gallery in NY and another show at the Jack Glen Gallery in Corona del Mar. Eversley went from being an unknown artist to a known artist, almost overnight and his good fortune continued: in 1977, Eversley became the first artist-in-residence at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. He also received large commissions: an eight-foot in diameter polyester sculpture in the lobby of Lenox Square in Atlanta in 1971, followed by a monumental 40-foot tall stainless steel, double element vertical parabola in 1977 at the entrance to the Miami Airport.

Eversley turns 80 years old this year, but he continues to make art with ageless vigor because he is still lit up by a love of discovery. He says, “if there are metaphysical energies, it is only reasonable to assume they obey the same laws as physics.” Eversley’s parabolic lenses are an aesthetic parallel to Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of the transcendental sublime because they bridge the material and the immaterial, the finite and the infinite, and the visible and the invisible—much like the invisible noumena beyond our subjective experience of the visible phenomena in our sensory reality. Therein lies their magic of sublime wonderment. Eversley insists that he “ still emphatically concurs” with poet, William Blake: Energy is the only life and its from the body: and reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.

Energy is Eternal Delight.

Valentine, Victoria L., “Los Angeles: 5 Gallery Shows Feature Works by Artists Fred Eversley, Amy Sherald, Stanley Whitney, Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, and Brenna Youngblood,” CultureType.com, March 20, 2021

Los Angeles: 5 Gallery Shows Feature Works by Artists Fred Eversley, Amy Sherald, Stanley Whitney, Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, and Brenna Youngblood

By Victoria L. Valentine | March 20, 2021 CURRENTLY ON VIEW IN LOS ANGELES, five galleries are presenting solo exhibitions of highly regarded African American artists working in a variety of mediums and styles, including portraiture, abstraction, and sculpture. The presentations include the first West Coast exhibition of Amy Sherald, Stanley Whitney’s first full-scale exhibition in Los Angeles, and Brenna Youngblood’s first solo show with Roberts Projects since joining the gallery earlier this year. Exhibitions devoted to Sherald, Youngblood, and Fred Eversley debut today:

FRED EVERSLEY, Untitled (parabolic lens), (1974) 2020, cast polyester, 19 1/2 x 19 5/8 x 5 7/8 inches (49.5 x 49.8 x 14.9 cm) | Photo by Jeff McLane, Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery

Fred Eversley: Recent Sculpture @ David Kordansky Gallery | March 20-May 1, 2021 With an engineering background in the aerospace industry, Fred Eversley first developed the methods and tools necessary to produce his Parabolic Lens sculptures in the late 1960s. Over the years, he has refined the process for producing the cast polyester works and explored a spectrum of possibilities in terms of color, transparency and luminosity. After living in Venice, Calif., for five decades, Eversley moved back East. He currently lives and works in New York, where he made the works on view over the last two years.

Russo, Carolyn, “The Science of Frederick Eversley’s Art,” AirandSpace.si.edu, February 26, 2021

The Science of Frederick Eversley’s Art

By Carolyn Russo | February 26, 2021

Installation view, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles: Fred Eversley, Chromospheres, January 12 – March 2, 2019, Photo: Jeff McLane, Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

Artist Frederick Eversley From a distance, Frederick Eversley’s perfectly round sculptures look like planets floating in space. Cast from polyester resin and color pigment, each one-of-a-kind form is a study unto itself. The highly-polished orbs reflect and refract the universe around them. Close-up, the sculptures pull observers in for an individual viewing experience. Fred Eversley’s art is often grouped with the “Light and Space” artworks made in California during the 1960s–1970s. The movement is associated with the minimalist and abstract qualities of art informed by the aerospace technologies and industries on the west coast. Art historian Danielle O’Steen visited the National Air and Space Museum’s art collection to examine Eversley’s artworks for her Ph.D. dissertation “Plastic Fantastic: American Sculpture in the Age of Synthetics.” In it she focuses on Eversley’s creative process and analyzes his sculpture alongside other prominent artists including Donald Judd (1928-1994) and Eva Hesse (1936-1970).

Russo, Carolyn, “The Science of Frederick Eversley’s Art,” AirandSpace.si.edu, February 26, 2021

Portrait of Fred Eversley by Elon Schoenholz. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

Fred Eversley, Untitled (parabolic lens), (1973) 2018, cast polyester 19 3/4 x 19 3/4 x 6 3/8 inches, (50.2 x 50.2 x 16.2 cm). Photography: Jeff McLane, Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

O’Steen says, “Eversley emerges as an artist in a particularly vibrant ‘plastics moment’ for artists in the U.S. during the 1960s and 1970s, but his methods of artmaking are entirely unique, and remarkable. He’s casting his sculptures through motion, which allows him to create the parabola in solid plastic. For Eversley, the parabola is the only shape that focuses energy to a single point, so it’s an endlessly dynamic shape to play with in a range of colors and hues.” The National Air and Space Museum has two of Eversley’s sculptures in our collection, both from his time as an artist-in-residence at the Museum.

An Artist in the Museum In 1970, Fred Eversley’s distinction as a sculptor rose quickly after a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York. However, his background was in aerospace. With a degree earned at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (Carnegie Mellon), he was an aerospace engineer for Wyle Laboratories and worked on projects for NASA during the Gemini and early Apollo programs. Aerospace also ran in the family. His father was an aeronautical engineer and executive for Republic Aviation. Eversley also used his engineer abilities to assist his artist neighbors in Venice Beach, with their kinetic sculptures. After a severe car accident, he changed careers and became an artist himself. The nominators for the Museum’s Artist in Residence program knew of Eversley’s background and thought he would be a great fit. In 1977, Fred Eversley was invited to work as the first artist in residence in the newly-opened National Air and Space Museum.

Russo, Carolyn, “The Science of Frederick Eversley’s Art,” AirandSpace.si.edu, February 26, 2021

Installation view, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles: Fred Eversley, Chromospheres, January 12–March 2, 2019, Photo: Jeff McLane.

Eversley’s world was aerospace again. Artifacts such as the Apollo 11 command module Columbia and the planes his father helped to design for Republic Aviation were familiar friends. The logistics of making art in the new Museum, on the other hand, was a challenge, especially without his state-of-the-art studio, which was back in California. Yet he endured. The Museum’s history of flight environment resulted in innovative new work, including a commission by the Miami International Airport. Standing 35-feet tall, the monumental sculpture Parabolic Flight comprises two twin sections of polished stainless-steel. The concept for the sculpture stemmed from Eversley’s research of vertical axis windmills–particularly the Savonius Rotor windmill. It’s actually a kinetic sculpture with interior lights generated by the wind, but for security concerns, the airport keeps it as a static display. Eversley has the distinction of being the first nominated artist to reap inspiration from the Museum’s collection, but he’s not the last. Since 2007, the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (SARF) funds artists on an annual basis to collaborate with curators and explore collections throughout the Smithsonian for their research.

Experimenting with Energy The artworks Untitled, 1978 and Untitled, 1980 acquired from Eversley’s residency are the iconic parabolic lenses he is known for. Untitled, 1978 is emerald green with a splash of transparent clear in the center. It resembles the depths of a pond with light bouncing off the surface or a precious gem. The color of Untitled, 1980 depends on the light and angle. From one side, the gray orb looks like the interior of a geode rock, and from another angle, it be-

Russo, Carolyn, “The Science of Frederick Eversley’s Art,” AirandSpace.si.edu, February 26, 2021

Fred Eversley, Untitled (parabolic lens), (1969) 2018, 3-color, 3-layer cast polyester, 19 1/4 x 19 1/4 x 6 inches, (48.9 x 48.9 x 15.2 cm). Photography: Jeff McLane, Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

Fred Eversley, Untitled (parabolic lens), (1969) 2018, detail, 2-color, 2-layer cast polyester, 19 1/2 x 19 1/2 x 6 inches, (49.5 x 49.5 x 15.2 cm). Photography: Jeff McLane, Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

comes a solar eclipse. Eversley describes his work more accurately. He says, “They reflect all forms of energy, all light, and whatever is in front of that parabolic surface gets concentrated into it. In other words, it forms an image of everything that it is looking at from a single focal point. And sometimes you can have the focal point outside or above the sculpture, in which case the whole sculpture becomes a parabolic mirror…and when the focal point is in the sculpture you have sort of a band of concentrated energy, like a round globe of energy floating in space…”

Eversley’s science interests and experimentations as a youth spawned his initial fascination with parabolic forms.

In his childhood home, he created a laboratory filled with his grandfather’s radio and photography equipment and learned the concept of the parabola from a science magazine article. The article described how the astronomer Galileo made a parabolic surface on water by spinning a bucket of water with a rope. To test the process himself, young Eversley filled a pie pan with water and spun it on his grandfather’s phonograph turntable. The results were a perfect concave on the water’s surface—a parabola.

In fact, all of Eversley’s parabola lenses are cast in polyester resin and polished on motorized turntables using the same process he discovered in his youth. But he perfected it. The size of each sculpture also depends on the size of the turntables. Eversley found gigantic turntables at an industrial auction site in California in a “junk heap” and was told by the foreman they were once used to machine parts for the atomic bombs during World War II. Douglas Aviation was another resource for California artists, as Eversley recalls: “They had a big facility in Santa

Russo, Carolyn, “The Science of Frederick Eversley’s Art,” AirandSpace.si.edu, February 26, 2021

Frederick Eversley, Untitled 1980, National Air and Space Museum. (Photo: Mark Avino/NASM)

Monica [and] they had a scraps facility with all the odd stuff… pieces of aluminum, plastic. [It was] open every Saturday… it was cheap and by the pound… some I used and some I never used.” Aerospace is a constant thread in Eversley’s work.

As for the magical colors in the sculptures, Eversley is humble and doesn’t take all the credit for the stunning results. He says, “Color is a total arbitrary thing. I’ve tried almost every color combination. Some have been multicolored, some single colored, some three or four colors, and some transparent—completely clear, no color—and some totally opaque… Each piece is essentially a surprise until you get it finished, and you clean it up, and stand it up, and look at it. In other words, you can make a guess [at] what it might be, but it never turns out exactly the way you thought it was going to turn out… A lot is happenstance… Each piece is its own animal.” Next up, Eversley will test a new blue color pigment that recently came on the market for artists. It’s referred to as “YInMn Blue,” based on the elements from the chemical periodic table. One can only imagine Eversley’s next experiment or “surprise.” Conceivably, the “YInMn Blue” could result in a sculpture that captures the energy, luminosity, and reflections of the heavens.

For 50 years, Eversley has been creating art in his Venice Beach, California, studio until a recent move to his studio in New York City. Now at 80 years old, he is busy preparing for new solo and group exhibitions and accepting accolades for his lifetime contributions to art. Among them is the Lifetime Achievement Award bestowed on him from Howard University. Eversley will also open Recent Sculpture, a new solo exhibition at the David Kordansky Gallery, in Los Angeles California, on March 20, 2021. It seems Fred Eversley’s own energy is limitless, and perhaps acquired from his own energy-generating art.

Dally, Jenny, “The Object and You: Fred Eversley in Conversation with Jenny Dally,” ArtJournal.CollegeArt.org, February 25, 2021

The Object and You: Fred Eversley in Conversation with Jenny Dally

By Jenny Dally | February 25, 2021

Fred Eversley in his Venice Beach studio, 2018 (photograph by Elon Schoenholz; photograph provided by David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles)

Fred Eversley initially conceived of his sculpture as “kinetic art without using kinetic elements.”1 Within seconds of encountering one of his cast-resin or polyester sculptures, the object takes hold of the visitor’s movement, guiding their eyes and body around the work with a visually alluring high sheen that casts a distorting lens on the environment. Eversley has produced such sculptures since the beginning of his career. Diverse in color and scale, they are unified by glossy surfaces and a complex, technical process—involving custom-designed tools and extensive polishing—that serves as a testament to his early scientific training. Born in Brooklyn in 1941, Eversley studied as an engineer at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and moved to Southern California in the early 1960s to work as a senior project engineer at Wyle Laboratories, where he developed testing facilities for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.2 He began his career in the art world by assisting his Venice Beach neighbors in the execution of technically challenging projects; he then went on to produce work in his own right in the late 1960s and soon became known as a central figure of the Light and Space movement. His sculptures exemplify the group’s interest in the atmospheric effects of their coastal environment, but they are distinguished by Eversley’s preoccupation with physical energy as a common characteristic of all humanity. Throughout his career, Eversley has sought to use energy as a central force in his work, with the hope of appealing to a universal audience.

Speaking by phone on April 26 and June 10, 2019, Eversley and I talked about his path to becoming an artist, the production of his work, and his ongoing practice of fifty-plus years. Our wide-ranging exchange has been edited for length and clarity, with some of Eversley’s responses reorganized to group similar themes; any text in brackets has been added for clarity. The below otherwise follows the progression of our conversation as it took place.

—Jenny Dally Jenny Dally: Your training is in engineering, you had considered medical school, and your professional background is in the aerospace industry. Could you tell me about how you came to be an artist, and specifically a sculptor?

Fred Eversley: Basically, I worked for a company called Wyle Laboratories as an engineer in El Segundo, California, and while I was there I was very involved in the local art community because we [various Light and Space artists and the artistic community of Venice Beach generally] all lived in Venice

Dally, Jenny, “The Object and You: Fred Eversley in Conversation with Jenny Dally,” ArtJournal.CollegeArt.org, February 25, 2021 together. And while I was an engineer, I met a young artist that I fell in love with, and I had an accident. I broke my thigh very badly and they put me on crutches for almost a year. And I was helping my girlfriend, Nancy, make her sculpture. She was an MFA student at UCLA and I used the opportunity—I was getting a disability payment from the state—to essentially experiment with making art myself, and that’s how I got started making art.

At first, the art was photographs encapsulated in plastic. I’d been a photographer for years, an amateur photographer, and so I started encapsulating photographs in plastic, which led to my work in polyester. I was making many layers of plastic to figure out how to get photographs to be flat in the plastic, and I started these experiments as little multilayer rectangles with plastic, which became interesting to me. Robert Rauschenberg came over and really loved my little pieces of sculpture and encouraged me a lot.

And my good friend John Altoon—he lived three doors down the street from the studio I was sharing with Charlie Mattox—encouraged me to forget my photographs and just deal with plastic because he thought it was more interesting. So I just started making experiments, mostly making multilayered, multicolored plastic. And I got into a few local shows at a few local museums, and Rauschenberg came over and said, “Forget trying to get a gallery in LA; go straight to New York, the LA scene is just too difficult.”

Fred Eversley, Untitled (parabolic lens), 1978, cast polyester, 19 1/2 x 19 1/4 x 2 1/2 in. (49.5 x 48.9 x 6.4 cm). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (photograph by Jeff McLane, provided by David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles)

So in February 1968 or ’69, I came to New York with an attaché case, around fifteen pieces, full of these little pieces of multilayered, multicolored polyester, and I took Rauschenberg’s advice. I met Betty Parsons first, because that’s the gallery he started in. And Betty said, “This is not the kind of work that I show but I love it, I really love them,” and she bought a couple little pieces from me. And from there, I went to see [Leo] Castelli and I was intercepted by his gallery manager, who said, “You have to show them to me before you can show them to Castelli.” I showed them to him, he loved them, but said that Castelli wouldn’t be interested in showing me. I saw Castelli and he loved the pieces, gave me a lot of encouragement, but didn’t offer to show them. And on the way out of the gallery, the first gentleman that looked at the sculptures said, “I’m opening a gallery in downtown Manhattan in December, please come see me, my name is Ivan Karp.” He gave me a card and I walked out of there feeling like a thousand bucks. I walked down Madison Avenue. There was a gallery called Richard Feigen, and I went up to see him, he loved them also and took one piece on consignment and put it in his display case.

And then I was on my way to see Marian Goodman, who had a little gallery called Multiples, and before I got there I came to the Whitney Museum. I remembered that an old friend of mine had become a curator at the Whitney, so I went to the phone at the desk in the lobby and called up to her and she invited me to come upstairs and see her. We hadn’t seen each other in probably six years, and I said “Well, I’m making sculptures.” She said, “You what?”

I said, “I’m making sculpture.” She knew I was an engineer, and she says, “Let me see them.” And so I pulled out my little attaché case, she loved them, and she picked up her telephone and basically got the entire senior staff into her office to look at my little sculptures. She called me the next day and she said, “Fred, how would you like to have a show at the Whitney in June?” And I thought she was kidding, because Marcia [Tucker] was a big kidder, and I didn’t do anything. I went back to sleep and she called at two o’clock in the afternoon. She says, “Fred, where the hell are you? You know, the whole senior staff is just waiting to meet you.” I said, “Marcia, you’re not serious”—she said, “Yes!” And so I jumped into the shower, grabbed my attaché case, and ran up to the Whitney and it was late, it was after five o’clock. But the staff was all assembled in the boardroom and was pissed off at me for making them stay late, but they looked at my little sculptures and they discussed. They said, “Do you have any larger sculptures in California?” And I said, “Yes,” which was a lie—I didn’t. I had experimented with big sculptures, I had one big piece that was in a show called Plastic Presence at the Jewish Museum—that’s now in the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum—the previous year. So I knew I could do big sculptures, and I was offered a show and I went back to California and started working like hell.

And that’s how I got started. Six months later I had my show at Ivan Karp [OK Harris], and then a show in Chicago at Phyllis Kind, concurrent with my show at the Whitney; they both happened one week apart in June of 1970. Yeah, that’s how I got started—it came out of nowhere. It came out of Rauschenberg stopping by the studio and Marcia at the Whitney. So one thing happened after another over six months, basically.

Dally: I imagine you walking through New York in one afternoon and introducing the whole New York art scene to your work and your practice in one fell swoop.

Eversley: I think it was something like February 7 that I went to Betty Parsons, and I think I had my meeting at the Whitney around February 8, and I immediately went back to California the same night. And worked my ass off and produced two shows of work, one for the Whitney and one for Phyllis Kind.

Dally: You talk about working like hell when you got back to California, and I’m certain your work is very labor intensive to produce. Could you walk me through the process of making one of your cast-resin or polyester pieces?

Eversley: Right. I had managed to find one assistant who helped me polish, so I cast and polished and this other assistant just polished. And we managed to get two shows together—more than two shows, because I was also in a group show at Pace, called The Last California Show [A Decade of California Color]—I had three pieces in that show. So, I mean, it was the Whitney show, the Pace show, the Phyllis Kind show, and the OK Harris show, all in six months.

The Whitney show and the Phyllis Kind show were pieces that we cast by spinning—casting multilayered, multicolored plastic into cylindrical forms, using a lathe to spin a large cylinder about the horizontal axis. For the OK Harris show, I switched from spinning them on the horizontal axis to spinning them on the vertical axis, which produced a parabolic shape as opposed to a cylindrical shape that I then cut.

Dally, Jenny, “The Object and You: Fred Eversley in Conversation with Jenny Dally,” ArtJournal.CollegeArt.org, February 25, 2021

Fred Eversley, Parabolic Flight, 1980, stainless steel, LED, and plastic, 36 ft. x 13 ft. 6 in. x 12 ft. 8 in. (11 x 4.1 x 3.9 m) (photograph provided by Art in Public Places Trust, Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs)

Dally: And how long does it take to produce one of those forms?

Eversley: At least two weeks in casting and polishing, if everything goes perfectly.

Dally: And this was right after you moved into John Altoon’s former studio.

Eversley: Yes; well, the early pieces that I produced—that Betty Parsons saw—I produced in my old studio that I was sharing with Charles Mattox. And John Altoon was a good friend, and I helped him out with stupid little shit like helping him with his air gun or changing a lightbulb or whatever. We became very good friends and saw each other virtually every day; he would walk his little dog down to the studio I was in. So when Altoon died in 1969, his widow, Roberta, gave me his studio and she went to New York and actually lived with my mother for a week or so until she got her own place in New York.

I first met John when I was still an engineer, and his wife, Roberta, was working for Frank Gehry. So when she ran into a problem while she was working, he called me up or went down the street and asked me to come up and help him with something. It all happened very serendipitously—just one thing led to the next.

Dally: It does feel very serendipitous. It really sounds like Venice was overflowing with artists. I read something about you living next door to John McCracken?

Eversley: John McCracken was next to Altoon, so when I took over Altoon’s place, McCracken was just next door. And my black pieces started out from the same can of black pigment that McCracken gave me. It’s a whole long story, but basically he gave me his can of black and started making his multichrome pieces, and that’s when I started making my first black pieces that led to my first white pieces that led to my first mutlicolored opaque pieces.

And in 1977 I got appointed as the first artist in residence at the Smithsonian [National Air and Space Museum], and while I was there—it’s a long story—but while I was there, I could not work in resin because of the fumes, so I started working in acrylics, in multiple layers of clear acrylic and then colored acrylic, basically cut into triangles and stacked up on each other. And so I did that for most of the time I was at the Smithsonian, and then I came back to LA for a week—I was on the founding committee of MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA—and I came back once a week for a month to go to those meetings and continue working on polyester pieces, but most of the pieces I did then, in Washington, were laminated pieces. And while I was at the Smithsonian, I got my second large commission, my largest commission, making the forty-foot, double-element parabolic vertical piece for the Miami airport entrance sculpture. I had done a large, multicolored, eight-foot-diameter sculpture for Lenox Square, the largest shopping center in America at the time, in Atlanta, and then the second major piece was my piece at the Miami airport, which was commissioned in ’77 and installed in ’80.

Dally, Jenny, “The Object and You: Fred Eversley in Conversation with Jenny Dally,” ArtJournal.CollegeArt.org, February 25, 2021 Dally: If I might back up for a second, I’m curious about the community of artists you were living and working with in the 1960s and ’70s. You’re obviously well known as part of the Light and Space movement, and I’m wondering if there are other artists you were engaging with or working alongside.

Eversley: Yes, when I was an engineer I did some consulting work for Larry Bell on his vacuum work, and then John McCracken and I were right next door to each other so I was very influenced by John. But I was very familiar with most of the Light and Space people in Venice— Peter Alexander, DeWain Valentine, all those people were in Venice. And all of us bought materials from the same art store in Santa Monica and were all in the same shows together. There was no term “Light and Space” in those days; even that “Fetish Finish,” you know, which is a bullshit term, even that hadn’t been coined yet. I make sculpture. I mean, I don’t think John McCracken ever considered himself a Fetish Finish guy. These terms are made up generally by nonartists—by art historians, or something, to satisfy the need to put a name on a show or a movement. The Light and Space movement has a little bit more validity than the Fetish Finish, but again, I heard it well after I had been doing my work. I’m supposedly a member of this school. I mean, I polished my work, but it wasn’t a Fetish Finish [laughs], what can I say.

You’re just making sculpture. All of us lived by the beach, all of us hung out in the same places, all of us were very much influenced by the light, the sun, and the beach. You know, the physical environment. And LA’s a big city, so the farthest east I went was La Cienega, except for going to visit Ed Ruscha, so I wasn’t familiar with anyone that didn’t live on the west side of town.

Dally: So you weren’t involved with the art movements developing in other parts of the city—the Black Arts Movement that was emerging and the Feminist Art Program, for instance?

Fred Eversley, Untitled (Black Hole), 1974, cast polyester, 20 x 20 x 2 in. (50.8 x 50.8 x 5.1 cm) (photograph by Joshua White, provided by David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles)

Eversley: No, only Judy Chicago (Judy Gerowitz at the time). She had been a very close friend and schoolmate with the woman I was living with when I had my accident.

And there was a group put together while I was still an engineer called the Aesthetic Research Center—it was basically a copy of EAT [Experiments in Art and Technology] in New York, of connecting technologists with artists—and I was assigned to Judy Chicago. But nothing ever happened.

Dally: Speaking of New York, were you involved at all prior to 1970 in the art scene in New York or Pittsburgh, before you moved to Los Angeles?

Eversley: No, not really involved, except that my girlfriend for the last three months I was at Carnegie Mellon was an artist, and we spent the summer of 1963 in Mexico, where she was studying art at the Instituto Allende. I mostly hung out just playing banjo and stuff. And so that was my little involvement before then. You know, growing up in New York, hanging out in the Village, you were surrounded by artists, but I didn’t have any particular connection with them. The one thing I had a connection with was the film world, because a very close friend of mine was Wendy Clarke, whose mother was Shirley Clarke, who was the first woman to win two Cannes awards for film, and I was basically the gopher—I went for pizza and that kind of thing, on the weekends and such. In Pittsburgh, not really; Jon Borofsky’s one of my fraternity brothers, but we’d play cards, we’d party together, we’d dance together.

Dally: All right, we can turn back to Los Angeles. You lived in LA for a long time, and I know you were recently forced to leave your studio and home that you’ve been in since .3 Are you based in New York full time now?

Eversley: I just moved to New York full time, after I lost my studio in California, basically in February. I’ve had my studio in New York since 1980.

Dally: How would you characterize your relationship to the city of Los Angeles over time and now?

Eversley: Well, again, LA’s a big city. And now traffic is very bad, so to get from one side of the city to the other side can take two hours. So basically I spent almost all of my time in Venice, and I spent an enormous amount of time in the studio. And I’m pretty local, up and down the coast, up to Malibu or up to Santa Barbara, down to Newport Beach. I don’t go very much into LA. Dally: Venice in the 1960s and 1970s was certainly a hotbed for lots of radical ideas and thinking. Were you at all involved in any of the social movements during that time?

Eversley: I was involved a bit in the civil rights movement and with the Vietnam War and those kinds of things. I wasn’t directly involved in a heavy sort of way because I was living in Venice, which is on the beach and not down in the ghetto, but, yes, I was involved. I was actually clubbed when I was on crutches at a rally for . . . I can’t remember who was running for vice president then. Yeah, I was involved, but it’s hard for me to be specific because it’s too long ago. But I was involved in the civil rights movement and progressive political movements since I was a teenager. First in New York and then Los Angeles.

Dally: Back to your work. You have mentioned the parabola is a form of particular interest to you, and I was wondering if you could talk about how you came to the parabola as a central form in your work and its significance to you.

Dally, Jenny, “The Object and You: Fred Eversley in Conversation with Jenny Dally,” ArtJournal.CollegeArt.org, February 25, 2021 Eversley: As a kid I had a sort of workshop in my parents’ home. My father was an engineer and my grandfather was an early experimenter in photography and electronics. And I had my amateur radio communications license when I was about seven, and so I basically did a lot of photography and a lot of electronics.

The parabola was the form I first learned about—I don’t know what age, thirteen or fourteen years old—in an issue of Popular Mechanics or Popular Science, I can’t remember which magazine. It’s the only shape that concentrates all forms of energy to a single focal point, and it was a form that was postulated by Isaac Newton. It’s called the Bucket Theory, since they spun a pail of water around an axis and created this shape. And then it was repeated in the 1800s by people attempting to make parabolic telescopes to look into space. They did it by spinning a pan of mercury around the vertical axis, and this created a perfect parabolic form that was a perfect reflector. The only trouble with that is mercury is very poisonous, so most of them died of mercury poisoning—so that fell out of popularity and very little was done with parabolas for many years. But it got me to just try to create a parabola by putting water into a pie pan and spinning it on an old phonographic turntable, and I could create a perfect reflector doing that.

So when I became an artist, I remembered all those little experiments I was doing as a teenager and attempted to do it in plastic, and it worked. The main use for parabolas, until very recently, has been in telescope reflectors, where they cast glass and then grind it into a parabolic shape. The parabolic shape constantly changes slope as you go around it, so you have to hand-polish a parabola—so telescopes are hand-polished for ten years. This has a very specific advantage in that it’s the only shape that concentrates all energy into a single focal point, so now it’s used in telescopes, in radar antennas—you know, anytime you want to concentrate all energy to a single focal point, you do it in parabolas. And I was interested in energy as a concept from the time I was a kid, first with photography and then with sculpture.

Fred Eversley, Untitled, 1969, three-color, three-layer cast polyester, 20 x 7 5/8 x 5 in. (50.8 x 19.4 x 12.7 cm) (photograph by Jeff McLane, provided by David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles)

To this day, I still attempt to create perfect parabolas. But as I was playing, I combined the three-layer experiments I’d done with my first series of sculptures— of spinning multiple colors around the horizontal axis—into doing it around the vertical axis, and that’s the basis of my current, my work since 1970. Again, it’s because of the concentration of energy. It creates a very unique form with very specific optical properties and acoustical properties and, if there are metaphysical energies, it’s only reasonable to assume that they follow the same laws of optics as all known forms of energy do.

Dally: You have talked about energy in a lot of your work, in both physical and metaphysical terms. Is there a connection in your work to religion or spirituality, or is it just a greater metaphysical consideration of the soul?

Eversley: Well, not to religion. Spirituality is a difficult one; it’s a difficult term. I don’t think of it in terms of spirituality. I think of it more in terms more universal than that—well, not universal, I guess. It makes people happy in some crazy way. If there’s one reaction I get to my work, it is that it really sucks people in, and that’s what I intend to do, you know, to make an object that is seductive enough that it sucks people in to physically interact with the art object, as opposed to something like a painting, where you stand back from it.

Dally: And do you think that the participation of the viewer and even of the environment as reflected or viewed through your sculptures adds to the work or completes it in some way?

Eversley: Yes, of course. That’s my objective and that is my satisfaction.

Dally: You’ve also said that your work should be lived with for a long time, which requires interaction not just in a gallery setting but in a much more personal, intimate setting.

Eversley: Yes, because it changes drastically in various lighting, and against the wall it’s very different from in front of a window. So I think I’ve been successful in that my work tends to be owned until someone dies—I’ve had very little turnover, very little resale. Virtually all of my collectors are the people that originally bought them, until they die and leave it to a museum or something.

Dally: As the person who has lived with your work the longest, do you think your relationship to it has changed over the course of your career? Does the work still reveal new aspects to you?

Eversley: Well, I live surrounded by my work. Every wall, every window, everything. And I’m still intrigued because I’m constantly learning a new thing. I mean, the change of plants growing outside, the change of light, the change of everything radically changes. And I love living with my own work.

Dally: I’m curious because you’ve talked so much about your background in photography and the interest in the optical properties of your parabolas. Do you think of them as connected to sight and opticality? I’m wondering because they take the form of lenses, and there’s the connection to your interest in photography and to the telescope . . .

Dally, Jenny, “The Object and You: Fred Eversley in Conversation with Jenny Dally,” ArtJournal.CollegeArt.org, February 25, 2021 Eversley: No, no, no. The photography was where I started. I haven’t really worked with photography myself in terms of sculpture since 1970. The pieces stand alone. There’s an enormous amount of photography that’s done of my work; I don’t do it myself. But, you know, I am constantly getting pictures that people send to me, when they observe a piece in the museum or someone’s home. And the notes that I get with the pictures are all very positive. People take selfies, they take pictures of their friends, people get engaged with them—and that’s what I try to do in the art is to get people engaged. And the feedback I’ve gotten over the years is extremely rewarding to me.

Dally: I can’t believe I haven’t asked this yet, but how did you come originally come to polyester and resin and plastic?

Eversley: Well, it’s the only material that is easy. I did intend to do a series of works in glass in Czechoslovakia in the 1990s. I spent the whole summer of ’93 or something in Czechoslovakia, the most advanced country in glasswork. And basically, it’s almost impossible to do my pieces in glass, because they crack as you try to go through the process. I had a whole bunch of experiments that I did, and someday I might even be successful. But the polyester gives you the freedom of—it’s plastic as opposed to glass, it’s a low-temperature process as opposed to a high-temperature glass process. It would be almost impossible in glass to do my multiple color pieces, and one day I might be able to—maybe technology will get to the point where I can do them in glass—but right now the plastic gives you much more freedom. And that’s why I use the polyester.

Dally: What kind of work are you doing now? Is it a departure from what you’ve been doing, or do you feel like it’s still in line with your earlier works?

Eversley: No, each piece is different. You try new combinations of colors, you try new combinations of depth of each layer—it’s an endless combination.

And each piece turns out to be unique enough. You don’t know what’s going to happen until you go through the final finish. I’m surprised at every piece I make. And I’m sure I could go on forever because it’s intriguing. It’s a never-ending kind of thing. I mean, I have no idea what I’m going to do six months from now, but right now I’m engaged enough in polyester that there’s no real reason to do something else.

Dally: To the point you made about combinations, how do you go about choosing your colors?

Eversley: First of all, I’m still using the same three colors and different combinations of different densities, because it changes radically. Recently I’ve been experimenting using other colors as well, and then using some pearlescent powders in the sculptures. And that is a whole new thing and becomes even harder to control, but it creates even more wondrous surfaces because you can get reflective qualities on each layer, as well as transmitted qualities.

Dally: I’m thinking of your black opaque lens pieces, which in 1978 you wrote were representative of black holes. And now that the photo from NASA of that black hole has been released, I’m curious how you’ve reacted to that.

Eversley: I got those images and I’ve been talking about black holes for years—I’ve had other images of black holes, also. And you know, I’m trying to figure out exactly what to do; I mean, I also got great images I took myself of the solar eclipse that just happened, and right now I’m working on how to deal with that. I’m intrigued by it; it fits right into what I’ve been doing. And I don’t know if that’ll affect exactly what I’m doing. But I’ve been thinking a lot about it.

I got a whole range of pictures of the eclipse and the black hole. There’s also something called the white dwarf, and all of those things sort of fit into what I’m doing. And I’m simply going to experiment more with all three of those things: eclipse, white dwarf, and the black hole.

The most recent picture I took and tried to make an object something like it was of the last lunar eclipse. I was out there on the streets at midnight taking photographs, and then trying to capture the essence of that eclipse in a piece of sculpture. My work is about light and I utilize light a lot. And the universe that we can see is all captured in tons of light. Even that which we can’t see is captured by instruments that are basically measuring light at frequencies higher than we can see visually.

Dally: I look forward to seeing what comes of those experimentations.

Eversley: So do I. Maybe nothing or maybe something, because just playing around—trying to simulate something, whether you end up doing it or not— opens up a whole new range of possibilities. Some will come out as planned, and some will be complete surprises. You know, what I’ve been trying to do—and I think I’ve been extremely successful at it—is for my work to be universal. In other words, I’m trying to reach a very broad audience, I’m trying to reach a universal audience, and I think I’ve been successful. I mean, the feedback I’ve gotten from shows I’ve had in Europe, from young kids to old people, from sort of art-educated people to people that just have no concept in terms of art or very little, have all been kind of universal. And that’s what drives me: universality in terms of appeal.

I think that the thing that all human beings have in common is energy. Sound, heat, sight, and such. And so I use this, I’ve postulated this as a way of universal communication, and the responses I’ve gotten over the years from not only sophisticated audiences in galleries and museums but from very nonsophisticated audiences in different countries all over the world, they all seem to respond to my sculptures in the exact same way. They don’t need to know about history or art or anything else; they just respond to the sculptures in a very universal way. Be they young people, old people, people knowledgeable about art or not knowledgeable about art, they transcend all the boundaries that usually separate people: Black art, white art, old art, new art, all of the various separations, I think my art transcends. I mean, it’s both old and new at the same time. You don’t need to know anything about language, you don’t need to know anything about anything except the object and you. And your response to it. ____________________ Jenny Dally is an art historian currently based in Houston, Texas. She holds an MA in modern and contemporary art history from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is curatorial assistant for prints and drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Fred Eversley is a sculptor living and working in New York City. Beginning his career as an aerospace engineer, he rose to prominence as a member of the Light and Space movement and has continued to produce highly technical cast-polyester sculptures for over fifty years.

1. Frederick Eversley, exh. cat. (Palm Springs, CA: Palm Springs Desert Museum, 1978).

2. Richard J. Powell and Virginia M. Mecklenburg, eds., “Frederick Eversley,” in African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond (Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2012).

3. An application was filed in 2018 to deem the studio a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, but as of 2019 the owner of the block of storefronts the studio occupies objected to its nomination.

Zahm, Oliver, “Fred Eversley,” Purple, Issue 32, 2019, pp. 320-325

Zahm, Oliver, “Fred Eversley,” Purple, Issue 32, 2019, pp. 320-325

Zahm, Oliver, “Fred Eversley,” Purple, Issue 32, 2019, pp. 320-325

Zahm, Oliver, “Fred Eversley,” Purple, Issue 32, 2019, pp. 320-325

Zahm, Oliver, “Fred Eversley,” Purple, Issue 32, 2019, pp. 320-325

Zahm, Oliver, “Fred Eversley,” Purple, Issue 32, 2019, pp. 320-325

“THE ARTISTS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW,” Artsy.net, The Artsy Vanguard 2019, September 16, 2019

Fred Eversley B. 1941, New York. Lives and works in New York.

Fred Eversley by Elon Schoenholz. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

Fred Eversley’s parabolic lens sculptures remind us of the wonder of being human in the vastness of the universe. His optically enticing works encourage self-reflection and shifts in perception.

In 1967, Eversley embarked on an art career in Los Angeles, employing many of the same tools, materials, and techniques he used in his previous profession as an engineer at NASA. His use of polished polyester resin for making sculptures anointed him into West Coast Minimalism, as well as the Light and Space movement, which focused on geometric shapes and the use of light.

Fred Eversley, Untitled (parabolic lens), (1969) 2018. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

“THE ARTISTS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW,” Artsy.net, The Artsy Vanguard 2019, September 16, 2019

Fred Eversley, Untitled, 1969. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

Fred Eversley, Untitled (parabolic lens), 1978. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

Eversley experienced success early on, receiving a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970 and a first-of-its-kind art residency in 1977 at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. He’s seen a resurgence recently, as his sculptures were included in exhibitions such as “Space Shifters” at the Hayward Gallery at Southbank Centre in London and the traveling “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963–1983.” Recently, Eversley joined the roster of David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles.

Kim Conaty, the Whitney Museum’s curator of drawings and prints who curated Eversley’s 2017 solo show at the Rose Art Museum, recalled that the artist had been dwelling on the future of his work in the 1970s. Eversley expressed hopes for people to live with his work for a long time, “pick it up, move it around, and really look at it as an ever-changing experience,” Conaty explained. “When I see his work, I always think of this, and the fascinating way that it unites the intimate and the cosmic.”

Fred Eversley, Untitled (Parabolic Lens), 1971. Hayward Gallery at Southbank Centre

Fred Eversley, Untitled (parabolic lens), (1969) 2018. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

Stromberg, Matt, “How Artist Fred Eversley Went From Consulting for NASA to Creating Otherworldly Sculptures,” Artnet.com, April 30, 2019

How Artist Fred Eversley Went From Consulting for NASA to Creating Otherworldly Sculptures The artist, who recently located to New York full time, is the subject of a solo presentation at Frieze New York this week.

By Matt Stromberg | April 30, 2019

Fred Eversley at home in New York City. Photo © 2019 Taylor Dafoe.

For 50 years, Fred Eversley’s studio in Venice, California served as a perfect encapsulation of his scientific approach to art. “It was an incredible hybrid of a science lab and an artist’s studio,” says Andrew Perchuk, deputy director of the Getty Research Institute. The studio, he adds, “was like an archaeology of Light and Space”—the West Coast brand of atmospheric minimalism pioneered by artists like Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, John McCracken, and, as the art world is increasingly coming to recognize, Eversley.

“You learned how he pioneered these different processes, because the kind of perceptual things he was looking for required an insane degree of precision,” Perchuk says. “It had a series of centrifuges, molds, casting equipment, flames—really magical.”

Stromberg, Matt, “How Artist Fred Eversley Went From Consulting for NASA to Creating Otherworldly Sculptures,” Artnet.com, April 30, 2019

That magic came to an end earlier this year after Eversley’s landlord refused to renew his lease, prompting him to relocate to New York full-time, where he has maintained a studio in SoHo for 43 years. Since his eviction, the Venice studio has received designation as a Historic-Cultural Monument, a bittersweet recognition of its significant creative legacy.

Despite this disruption, Eversley is having a pretty good year. The 77-year old Light and Space artFred Eversley, Untitled (1969) [detail]. Photo: Jeff McLane. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los ist (though he bristles at that laAngeles. bel) had a virtually sold-out solo show of new work at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, Chromospheres, and was included in two very different group shows: Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983, now on view at the Broad in LA, and Space Shifters, a survey of minimalism and works that explore perception and optics, at London’s Hayward Gallery.

Kordansky will also be bringing a historical selection of his works from the ’60s through the ’80s to Frieze New York later this week for a solo booth, where the historic works will be on offer in the range of $350,000 to $400,000. Finally, LACMA recently acquired their first Eversley sculpture, one of his signature cast-resin parabolic lenses from 1972, bringing some hometown recognition to the artist who, until he was evicted in March, had maintained a studio in Venice for 50 years.

But were it not for a fortuitous accident, Eversley may never have become an artist at all.

Accidental Beginnings Eversley’s journey to art began in an unlikely place: engineering school. Born and raised in Brooklyn (his New York accent is a giveaway), he studied electrical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon) in Pittsburgh before moving to LA in 1963 to work for Wyle Laboratories, where he built acoustical testing facilities for NASA. Settling in Venice—one of the only neighborhoods that would rent to African Americans at the time—he was surrounded by artists even before he became one himself. In his spare time, he would help his artist neighbors, including Judy Chicago, solve their peskiest engineering problems.

Then, in 1967, disaster struck. He suffered a debilitating car accident, which he says almost killed him and put him on crutches for the better part of a year. He used the time off to explore making his own art—and never looked back. But though he did not return to engineering work, his art is infused with many of the themes that came up in his former day job: energy concentration, perception, reflection, and luminosity.

Stromberg, Matt, “How Artist Fred Eversley Went From Consulting for NASA to Creating Otherworldly Sculptures,” Artnet.com, April 30, 2019

These same concepts were at the heart of the work of many other West Coast artists, including Peter Alexander and John McCracken, who were using polyester resins to develop a slick, distinctly West Coastflavored minimalism. Eversley’s earliest works were transparent cylinders cast in concentric layers of violet, amber, and blue, sliced at different angles to produce luminous, sharp-edged shapes.

“His life was running parallel to the art world and suddenly it truly intersects at precisely the moment and the place where artists were also becoming more interested in the questions that he had been interested in as an engineer,” notes the Whitney Museum’s prints and drawings curator Kim Conaty.

An Auspicious Rise Just two years after he committed himself to art full-time, Eversley’s star was rising rapidly. In 1969, he took over a Frank Gehry-designed studio in Venice formerly occupied by painter John Altoon. But fellow artist Robert Rauschenberg told him that if he really wanted to make it as an artist, he’d need gallery representation in New York.

Fred Eversley, Untitled (Rose Mist) (1984). Photo: Jeff McLane. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

“I said, ‘Where do I even start?’” Eversley recounts. “He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘I started showing with Betty Parsons, why don’t you go see Betty?’”

Although she bought a couple pieces for herself, the legendary dealer known as an early champion of Abstract Expressionism wasn’t interested in showing Eversley, nor was the next dealer he approached, Leo Castelli. On that same trip to New York, however, he stopped at the Whitney Museum to see then-curator Marcia Tucker. (“We both hung out in the village in the ’50s,” Eversley explains.)

The stop would prove momentous. “Marcia loved my work and called the whole staff in,” he says. “They offered me a show six months later.”

Without a solo gallery show under his belt, Eversley landed a solo exhibition at the Whitney, which opened in May 1970, followed by shows at the Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago and at OK Harris that December.

“It was a good year, 1970,” Eversley says.

Stromberg, Matt, “How Artist Fred Eversley Went From Consulting for NASA to Creating Otherworldly Sculptures,” Artnet.com, April 30, 2019

Where Science Meets Art In the 50 years since this auspicious debut, Eversley has rarely strayed from a single form: the parabola. Ever the engineer, he is fascinated by the fact that this shape can concentrate energy at a single focal point.

Even as a teenager, he recalls, “I was messing around in my parents’ basement using a phonograph table and a pie pan to make a parabolic pond of water.”

This is essentially the same process by which he creates his lenses today, using a centrifuge to spin resins as they harden. “I often think of his sculptures along the lines of ceramics: cast on a rotating wheel, intensely hands-on—engineering meets intuition,” says Eversley’s dealer David Kordansky.

Fred Eversley at home in New York City. Photo © 2019 Taylor Dafoe.

The spinning process—which sometimes involves pouring multiple colors of resin at precisely the right moment so they properly blend together—is followed by repeated sanding and polishing to create a pristine surface. Over the years, Eversley has experimented with numerous variations, so this single shape can range from a transparent pastel lens to an opaque, inky black mirror.

His lenses entice the viewer to move around them, watching as their perception of the object—and its reflection of the world around them—changes with each step. Eversley considers his works forms of kinetic art, although the spectator, rather than the art object, is the one moving. His goal, he has said, is to focus “the spectator into perceiving the complex nature of reality, both physical and social.”

At Frieze, Kordansky will present a selection of parabolic works ranging from magenta to smoke to midnight blue alongside Eversley’s earliest tricolor, cylindrical works, many of which have never been shown publicly.

A Late Renaissance Despite his central position in the Light and Space movement, Eversley has not received the same level of recognition afforded some of his peers, such as Robert Irwin and John McCracken. “I have to attribute this, in part, to race and institutionalized blind spots and discrimination,” Kordansky says.

Stromberg, Matt, “How Artist Fred Eversley Went From Consulting for NASA to Creating Otherworldly Sculptures,” Artnet.com, April 30, 2019

His work also does not fit neatly into art historical categories. Eversley’s focus on energy and physics was often at odds with the formal concerns of his fellow Light and Space contemporaries; at the same time, he was not considered part of the Black Arts Movement, which took a more explicitly political and figurative approach.

Conaty considers Eversley’s work to be more closely aligned with that of African American abstract painters like Sam Gilliam or Jack Whitten, “who seized upon abstraction as a broad language that was accessible for all… so in a way the political gesture is in making space for one’s work within these vocabularies.”

To be sure, Eversley hasn’t been completely overlooked. He has had consistent solo shows every few years, though his laborintensive process has limited his output.

His works are in the collections of more than 40 museums. But he has become much more visible over the past five to 10 years following his prominent inclusion Fred Eversley, Untitled (parabolic lens) (1974). Photo: Jeff McLane. Courtesy of David the inaugural Pacific Standard Time iniKordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. tiative in 2012, which made the case for a major reappraisal of West Coast art. New York’s Museum of Modern Art acquired one of his lenses in 2017; LACMA followed suit earlier this year.

Then came his 2019 show with Kordansky, who Eversley says he knew nothing about when the dealer initially reached out. But after a studio visit, the artist recalls, “We basically fell in love with each other.

He’s done very well by me.” His market is certainly gathering steam: In February, a tricolor polyester ring sold at auction for $281,250, more than five times its $50,000 high estimate. Smaller, monochrome rings sold for $43,750 in 2018 and just $600 in 2004.

It is perhaps surprising that an artist who has dedicated himself to exploring and refining the same form over five decades would still prize novelty. But Eversley can’t contain himself when he hears how crowds gathered around his work at the opening of Soul of a Nation in Los Angeles. One by one, they inched closer to find a sweet spot where the lens collected and amplified the space’s acoustics.

“Since it concentrates sound as well as light, and there’s a distance between your eyes and your ears, people always play a game of trying to get their eyes and ears at this focal point,” Eversley explains. “It’s impossible. So they play this game, going back and forth.” With a current of delight in his voice, he says, “It sucks people in.”

“‘SOUL OF A NATION” AT THE BROAD,” LACMAonFire.blogspot.com, March 25, 2019

“SOUL OF A NATION” AT THE BROAD March 24, 2019

The Broad is generally a place with a high ratio of people dressed in black to black people. Not so this past weekend. The Tate Modern-originated “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983” has just opened at the Broad, its final stop after London, Brooklyn, and Bentonville.

The Tate is not known for deep expertise in African-American art, and the Broad is the temple of market-validated art. Yet “Soul of a Nation” is original and informative throughout. It has big names and well-known works, from Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima to Barkley Hendricks’ Brilliantly Endowed. But the show is most notable for its astute selection of underrecognized works. Some 60 artists are shown in ten rooms that are loosely chronological and geographical.

The Last Testament of Archibald Motley. Motley is known for comic depictions of black Chicago, created for black audiences. LACMA’s 2014 Motley exhibition omitted his final painting, The First One Hundred Years… Ten years in the making, it’s a mordant political allegory that disenchanted some of the artist’s followers. Motley considered it his masterpiece, and I’d say we should believe him. It’s like Tyler Perry morphed into Jordan Peele for the last Madea movie.

Politics v. Abstraction. The show’s mainspring is the debate over whether black art must be political to be relevant. Abstraction commands a surprising amount of space. Jazz, held to be

“‘SOUL OF A NATION” AT THE BROAD,” LACMAonFire.blogspot.com, March 25, 2019

Archibald Motley, The First One Hundred Years: He Amongst You Who is Without Sin Shall Cast the First Stone; Forgive Them Father For They Know Not What They Do (c. 1963-72)

Norman Lewis, American the Beautiful (1960)

the most “abstract” music, was a popular talking point among nonobjective artists. Some artists produced both abstract and explicitly political work: Norman Lewis segued from AbEx to painting Klansmen before Philip Guston did.

The single Alma Thomas, Mars Dust, is great. New to me is an elegantly linear abstraction by Virginia Jaramillo. It’s the not-so-political figurative artists who get short shrift. There are single works each by Bob Thompson and Beauford Delaney, and neither is the artist’s best or most characteristic.

Virginia Jaramillo, untitled (1971)

Bob Thompson, Le Roi Jones and his Family (1964)

Jay-Z’s David Hammons. Social media is buzzing that Jay-Z attended the Broad opening (solo) and talked up the work he lent, a print. That “print” is a unique David Hammons body print, Shine (1969). Credited to “The Carter Collection,” it’s as fine a choice as any billionaire could hope for.

CAAM. Judging from the Broad survey, the really astute collector is the California African-American Museum. It has lent many of the pivotal L.A. works, such as Noah Purtifoy’s Watts Riot, David Hammons’ Admissions Office, and Betye Saar’s Sambo’s Banjo.

“‘SOUL OF A NATION” AT THE BROAD,” LACMAonFire.blogspot.com, March 25, 2019

Noah Purifoy, Watts Riot (1966)

David Hammons, Shine (1969)

Phillip Lindsay Mason , The Deathmakers, 1968

Have You Seen This Painting? No group show gets every work its curators wanted. “Soul of a Nation” has a label asking for information on the whereabouts of a missing Phillip Lindsay Mason painting, The Deathmakers. With calavera cops, dead Malcolm X, and an op-inspired flag, it ought to be hard to miss.

Puryear and Eversley in the BroadCave. Abstract sculptures by Fred Eversley and Martin Puryear are installed in the Diller Scofidio + Renfro lobby. The Puryear could almost be site-specific.

Fred Eversley, Monochrome, Transparent Black (1972)

Martin Puryear, Self (1978)

Kahn, Howie, “Evicted From His Home, Sculptor Fred Eversley Contemplates the Future,” WSJ.com, February 27, 2019

Evicted From His Home, Sculptor Fred Eversley Contemplates the Future After spending over 50 years in Venice, California, the long-overlooked artist now must square up to leaving

By Howie Kahn | February 27, 2019

HUE DID IT Eversley at his studio in Venice, California, surrounded by the parabolic resin sculptures he has been making since the early 1970s. The two on the left featured in his recent show at David Kordansky Gallery. PHOTO: ALESSANDRA SANGUINETTI FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE; ART FROM LEFT: FRED EVERSLEY, UNTITLED (PARABOLIC LENS), (1969) 2018, 2-COLOR, 2-LAYER CAST POLYESTER, 19 1/4 X 19 1/4 X 6 INCHES (48.9 X 48.9 X 15.2 CM); FRED EVERSLEY, UNTITLED (PARABOLIC LENS), (1974) 2018, CAST POLYESTER, 19 1/2 X 19 1/2 X 6 INCHES (49.5 X 49.5 X 15.2 CM); FRED EVERSLEY, UNTITLED (PARABOLIC LENS), (1973) 2018, CAST POLYESTER, 19 1/2 X 19 1/2 X 5 7/8 INCHES (49.5 X 49.5 X 14.9 CM)

Fred Eversley has been working out of the same 3,000-square-foot studio on Abbot Kinney Boulevard for the past 50 years. The engineer-turned-artist moved to Venice in 1964. “It was the only place on the beach in Los Angeles where black people could get a lease,” he says. Eversley, 77, inherited his studio’s lease from the widow of his friend, the artist John Altoon, after Altoon’s untimely death in 1969. Two years prior, the architect Frank Gehry had reconfigured the space for Altoon, separating the working area in front from the residence in back. Eversley was just a few doors down at the time, sharing a studio with the artist Charles Mattox. Other artists, including John McCracken, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin and James Turrell, were also nearby. Eversley recalls gathering in Turrell’s studio and talking art theory while sitting on a Navajo rug, smoking and listening to Turrell’s then-wife play the harp. “It used to be magic,” says Eversley. “I was lucky I found Venice. Without this community, I probably never would have become an artist.”

Kahn, Howie, “Evicted From His Home, Sculptor Fred Eversley Contemplates the Future,” WSJ.com, February 27, 2019

Sculptures by Fred Eversley at his studio in Venice, California. PHOTO: ALESSANDRA SAGUINETTI FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE

Eversley grew up in Brooklyn. His father was an engineer for Republic Aviation before building a multimillion-dollar construction company, and his mother was a teacher. Eversley himself studied engineering at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh. When he moved to L.A., he put his degree to use by working at Wyle Laboratories, helping to build acoustical testing facilities for NASA’s space flight program. He dated a UCLA M.F.A. student and soon recognized that his know-how as an engineer could be useful in making art, too.

As a result, he joined a local, short-lived group called the Aesthetic Research Center, through which he helped artists around L.A. with engineering problems. “One of them was Judy Gerowitz,” Eversley says. “[She] became Judy Chicago.” Of Eversley’s former compatriots, only Bell still works in Venice, splitting his time between there and Taos, New Mexico. The strip of Abbot Kinney where Eversley operates has become valuable commercial property—his current neighbors sell single-origin espresso and organic bedding. “I’m the last one standing,” he says.

The popularity of Eversley’s signature parabolic lens sculptures has surged lately, with a recent, nearly sold-out show at Los Angeles’s David Kordansky Gallery. Each of the 10 new works there, roughly 20 inches in diameter and 6 inches thick, is priced at $250,000. They range from jewel-toned to pearlescent to celestial. But as the show opened and Eversley’s collectors converged, he was also dealing with the possibility of removal from his studio and considering whether to remain in the city he credits with sparking his artistic career. Working and living in a rent-stabilized space means Eversley has paid well below market value. His landlord, ABCO LLC, has tried to raise his rent substantially since at least 1980, he says; a 2011 court ruling found it attempted to do so unlawfully. When Eversley’s most recent lease concluded last July, he was not offered a renewal. The City of Los Angeles Planning and Land Use Management committee recommended the City Council designate the building as a Historic-Cultural Monument on January 29 in response to a petition from a conservation group led by friends. Eversley, who shares the space with his wife, the sculptor and architect Maria Larsson, was served an eviction notice on January 30; the court granted him until February 11 to vacate. (ABCO LLC declined to comment.)

Eversley left his engineering career to pursue art full time in 1967. His leg had been crushed in a car accident, and while he was recovering away from his lab, he started devoting time to making his own pieces. He began by manipulating polyester resin with the intention of encasing photo transparencies within small sculptures of his design. But

Kahn, Howie, “Evicted From His Home, Sculptor Fred Eversley Contemplates the Future,” WSJ.com, February 27, 2019

PHOTO: ALESSANDRA SANGUINETTI FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE

he became preoccupied with the metaphysical energy he attributed to the resin itself. His early casts manifested as tubes, bricks and objects resembling flying saucers and NASA space modules small enough to fit in one’s palm.

In 1970, on the recommendation of the artist Robert Rauschenberg, who decried the lack of opportunities for artists in L.A., Eversley paid a visit to the gallery of the powerful New York dealer Betty Parsons. At their meeting in Manhattan, Parsons bought a sculpture from the artist. On the same day, Eversley showed his work to his friend Marcia Tucker, then a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. “I showed her the pieces, she freaked out.... In five minutes the entire senior staff at the Whitney was standing in her office,” he recalls. Just three years into his new pursuit, the fledgling artist was offered a solo show at the Whitney. He was told he’d have three months to prepare. “I flew back here to the studio in Venice and worked nonstop.”

The Whitney exhibition launched a career that landed Eversley in the permanent collections of museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York’s Museum of Modern Art; he would also complete almost two-dozen public commissions for places like the international airports in Miami and San Francisco and an Internal Revenue Service office.

Though Eversley is often associated with Light and Space—a Southern Californian art movement originating in the 1960s—he says his work is more accurately about energy. While artists like Turrell and Irwin are often concerned with expansive experiences and the ways in which bodies are oriented in space, Eversley started working with parabolas because of his fascination with the way they concentrate energy through a single focal point. He spun his first parabolic lenses shortly after the Whitney show concluded in 1970, coloring liquid resin with dye or pigment and pouring it into a cylindrical mold on a turntable, which he would then set into motion. The faster the turntable spins, the greater the centrifugal and gravitational forces. The more centrifugal force exerted on the resin, the deeper the parabolic curve.

One of Eversley’s favorite placements for a sculpture was not in a museum or gallery, but rather at the end of a psychiatrist’s couch. The doctor, a collector, told him it helped patients with personal reflection. Though such works are merely a couple of feet in diameter, they give the impression that looking through them offers passage to another dimension.

Kahn, Howie, “Evicted From His Home, Sculptor Fred Eversley Contemplates the Future,” WSJ.com, February 27, 2019

Laminated and convex sculptures by Fred Eversley. PHOTO: ALESSANDRA SANGUINETTI FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE

David Kordansky, Eversley’s gallerist since last summer, believes the art world has overlooked the power of his artist’s work. “We’re going to change that,” Kordansky says. The sculptures, he says, are both psychedelic and cosmic, “objects whose atmosphere supersedes their objecthood.” Like Kordansky, the multidisciplinary artist Kerry James Marshall considers Eversley to be of a piece with other seminal L.A. artists exploring the intersection of art, science, technology and futurism, except with one significant difference. “Fred was the only black artist I knew of who was doing the same things they were doing,” Marshall wrote, via email.

“It is important to acknowledge the truth that there have always been black people in science and technology.”

Eversley steers the conversation back toward energy when asked to discuss the relationship between race and his own work. “Take me for what I do,” he says. “Physical properties are not attuned to race. Gravity is the same for everyone. The work is more about looking at what’s universal rather than what’s different. The differences are really very small.”

One afternoon this past January, facing a possible February eviction, Eversley started casting new work. He monitored the spinning, solidifying resin over the course of 10 hours, concluding after midnight. Parts of another new piece stood in an adjacent workspace: 20 lenses in an array of colors, all in various phases of Eversley’s rigorous 14-step polishing process. He didn’t know if he’d be permitted to stay in the studio long enough to finish the piece. He has considered leaving L.A. altogether and moving back to New York, where he owns a building in SoHo. He says he could also start over again elsewhere in L.A. “But no place I’ve lived has felt like Venice,” he says. “I’ve been influenced by the waves, the wind, the sun and how it all made people happy.” Eversley draws a deep breath.

“That’s why the studio is here.”

Editor’s Note: Since this story went to press and legal proceedings concluded, Fred Eversley moved out of his Venice Beach studio and residence on Sunday, February 10th, 2019. He is currently living and working in the property he owns in New York City while determining his next move.

PHOTO: ALESSANDRA SANGUINETTI FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE

Larkey, Molly, “Fred Eversley at David Kordansky,” ContemporaryArtReview.la, Snap Reviews, February 21, 2019

Snap Reviews

Fred Eversley at David Kordansky Gallery

By Molly Larkey | February 21, 2019

Undoubtedly, art today is viewed more on the screen of a computer or a phone than in person.

And yet, the full impact of the art object requires bodily engagement in real time and space, as perspective shifts and details of color, texture, and form come into focus. Fred Eversley’s sculptures—made of tinted cast polyester painstakingly refined into lenses that bend and swerve the reflected environment—generate encounters in which the act of looking shapes our perceptions of ourselves or others.

Eversley left his career in aerospace engineering in the late ’60s to craft simple geometric art objects that use the optics of physics to refract and focus light, a signature approach that quickly brought the artist recognition as a key player in Los Angeles’ Light and Space movement.

Chromospheres at David Kordansky Gallery, his first show with the gallery, consists of ten semi-transparent discs of varying colors that he conceived between 1969 and 1974—creating a set of molds for the work at that time—but didn’t Fred Eversley, Chromospheres (2019) (installation view). Image courtesy of the actually cast until 2018. All of the works bear the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Jeff McLane. same title, Untitled (parabolic lens), and size, approximately 20 inches in diameter and 6 inches deep. Placed at right angles on white plinths, and spaced so that a viewer can circumnavigate them, their surfaces are slippery reflections that shift in hue, depth, and saturation depending on her position.

We can intellectually understand that the particular cultural lenses through which we view the world shift our vision of ourselves and others; Eversley’s sculptures communicate this idea through embodied interaction. The absence of other people within the stark white gallery lessens the impact—Eversley’s work is at its best when architecture, other bodies, and self-reflection become intermingled and distorted within his sculptural lenses. Antithetical to looking at a screen or even a printed page—which is characterized by solitude and flatness—here, looking (at the object and ourselves) becomes looking through (at others), and vice versa. This combination of transparency, reflection, and distortion renders visible a process whereby cultural artifacts and ideas are in fact lenses that direct and shape our perceptions. In a cultural moment when our subjectivities are so deeply divergent—our viewpoints of the world based in radically different assumptions, interpretations and perspectives—these works compel a physical awareness of how cultural objects, and the experiences they engender, shape our subjectivity.

Fred Eversley, Untitled (parabolic lens), 1973 (2018). Cast polyester, 20 x 20 x 6 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Gerlis, Melanie, “City full of light and space,” Financial Times, Collecting, FTWeekend, February 9-10, 2019, pp. 1-2

Gerlis, Melanie, “City full of light and space,” Financial Times, Collecting, FTWeekend, February 9-10, 2019, pp. 1-2

Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter, “Evan Holloway and Fred Eversley at Kordansky Gallery,” KCRW.com, January 10, 2019

Evan Holloway and Fred Eversley at Kordansky Gallery

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp | January 10, 2019

Evan Holloway. Siblings, 2018. powder-coated aluminum, high-tempspray paint, bulbs, fixtures, wiring,and lighting controller. 101 x 38 x 17 1/4 inches (256.5 x 96.5 x 43.8 cm)unique.

Photography: Lee Thompson. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

Two artists at David Kordansky Gallery take on the history of modern sculpture but in very different ways: Evan Holloway and Fred Eversley.

In the early 20th century, Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore, were titans of modern art. How does a contemporary artist, working today in Los Angeles, respond to that past?

One answer can be seen in the newest work by Evan Holloway.

The L.A.-based Holloway, who got his undergraduate and graduate degrees at UCLA, has been tackling such issues since the 1990s, often combining the sorts of functional or funky materials that were far from the modernists’ consciousness in forms that alluded to that well known past.

To really operate in that realm, however, you have to go big and Holloway has taken maximum advantage of that opportunity in this show titled Outdoor Sculpture.

Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter, “Evan Holloway and Fred Eversley at Kordansky Gallery,” KCRW.com, January 10, 2019

There are five large pieces made for outdoor locations. Each is noticeably unique from the others yet each has obvious references to the history of modern sculpture, including substantial materials meant to last for the ages.

Giacometti, known for his skinny sculptures of people, such as his “walking man,” is the source for Holloway’s extraordinary starburst of cast bronze.

Evan Holloway. Third Verse, 2018. patinated bronze 127 x 87 3/4 x 43 inches (322.6 x 222.9 x 109.2 cm) Edition of 3, with 1AP. Photography: Lee Thompson. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

In this case, three legs support an oval from which long rays extend, each terminating in a molded narrow face.

The faces are upright or upside down depending on their placement on the circle of rays. Titled Third Verse (2018) from The Book of the Law, the 1904 writings of occultist Aleistair Crowley, it refers to the verse stating, “Every man and every woman can be a star.”

A number of Southern California artists have been interested in the unfettered lifestyle and theories of Crowley, who had lived here and had a devotee in Cal Tech scientist Jack Parsons.

Holloway, however, includes the reference as part of an over-reaching personal cosmology and his desire to have sculptures carrying multiple levels of meaning.

Henry Moore, known for voluptuous figurative forms, is the starting point for another sculpture by Holloway, Earth Angel (2018).

Concave on one side, convex on the other, it

Evan Holloway. Earth Angel, 2018. patinated bronze 84 1/2 x 79 x 54 inches (214.6 x 200.7 x 137.2 cm) unique. Photography: Lee Thompson. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter, “Evan Holloway and Fred Eversley at Kordansky Gallery,” KCRW.com, January 10, 2019

looks like a rounded lump of asteroid covered with studs.

On closer inspection, these turn out to be cast from actual batteries: nine volts, C and D size cylinders.

Holloway previously embedded his plaster sculptures with such batteries that, he says, have a brief active life but a lengthy passive life with an impact on the environment. This musing on the fact and myth of power also manifests in his use of bronze as material connoting wealth and prestige.

Evan Holloway. 28 Incense Sticks, 2018. aluminum, incense110 x 92 x 61 inches (279.4 x 233.7 x 154.9 cm) unique (Inv# EH 18.031). Photography: Lee Thompson. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

A third sculpture of cast aluminum is a serpentine mobius strip dotted with barely noticeable holes, 28 of them, to hold sticks of incense.

They represent the 28 nights of the lunar calendar with packets of myrrh incense provided by the artist. The curvilinear forms look like rising smoke and their tough, reflective surface is in opposition to the fragility of a stick of incense.

A fourth sculpture will be most familiar to Holloway fans. Two columns of wildly colored cartoon-like heads, stacked atop one another sideways, ear to ear, like wonky totem poles. It is lined with flashing lights, like something out of a carnival.

The fifth is a potted plant and a hanging plant suspended from an overhead support and cast in a green-toned bronze. It is both mundane and utterly strange, a way of bringing the indoors outdoors.

Originally made of cardboard, it looks as though hastily assembled yet it is cast in a green-toned bronze.

Sculpture concerns volume in space, the physical relationship of the art to the viewer. Holloway gears his pieces to his own

Evan Holloway. Houseplant, 2018. patinated bronze75 x 63 x 41 inches (190.5 x 160 x 104.1 cm) unique. Photography: Lee Thompson. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter, “Evan Holloway and Fred Eversley at Kordansky Gallery,” KCRW.com, January 10, 2019

body and is cognizant of the impact from near and far perspectives.

The standards of formal sculpture are referenced while maintaining the hand-made, idiosyncracy that has long characterized his work.

In 2008, Holloway showed at Pomona College with the Light and Space artist James Turrell. At Kordansky, his work is paired with another artist from the period, Fred Eversley. The Venicebased artist gained recognition for his sculptures made of colored, polished resin as part of the Light and Space movement in Southern California of the 1960s.

His latest round discs, Chromospheres, each close to two feet tall, Fred Eversley. Untitled (parabolic lens), (1973) 2018. cast polyester19 3/4 have been hollowed out on one side x 19 3/4 x 6 3/8 inches (50.2 x 50.2 x 16.2 cm). Photography: Jeff McLane. so that rich color on the perimeter Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles becomes translucent at the interior.

They continue his lengthy concern with the “parabolic lens,” which concentrates yet diffuses reflected light.

In this installation, each disc is mounted on a white base of equal height so a viewer can look through a portal of color to see another sculpture. Red ruby, golden amber, smoky black, the color of each disc conveys a different visual experience. The shapes may be simple but the effect is intense and captivating. Both shows continue to March 2.

“Fred Eversley,” Kerry James Marshall: A Creative Convening, Edited by Sandra Jackson-Dumont, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018, pp. 137-144

“Fred Eversley,” Kerry James Marshall: A Creative Convening, Edited by Sandra Jackson-Dumont, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018, pp. 137-144

“Fred Eversley,” Kerry James Marshall: A Creative Convening, Edited by Sandra Jackson-Dumont, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018, pp. 137-144

“Fred Eversley,” Kerry James Marshall: A Creative Convening, Edited by Sandra Jackson-Dumont, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018, pp. 137-144

“Fred Eversley,” Kerry James Marshall: A Creative Convening, Edited by Sandra Jackson-Dumont, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018, pp. 137-144

“Fred Eversley,” Kerry James Marshall: A Creative Convening, Edited by Sandra Jackson-Dumont, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018, pp. 137-144

“Fred Eversley,” Kerry James Marshall: A Creative Convening, Edited by Sandra Jackson-Dumont, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018, pp. 137-144

“Fred Eversley,” Kerry James Marshall: A Creative Convening, Edited by Sandra Jackson-Dumont, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018, pp. 137-144

“Fred Eversley,” Kerry James Marshall: A Creative Convening, Edited by Sandra Jackson-Dumont, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018, pp. 137-144

Harris, Gareth, “Blue-chip artists, evergreen appeal,” Financial Times, December 7, 2018, p. 6

By Gareth Harris | December 7, 2018

Reyburn, Scott, “Paris Lures the Art Crowd,” The New York Times, October 24, 2018, p. 14

Reyburn, Scott, “Paris Lures the Art Crowd,” The New York Times, October 24, 2018, p. 14

Lesauvage, Magali, Eleonore Thery, and Marine Vazzoler, “A la Fiac, une pluie de ventes / At Fiac, une shower of sales,” L’Hebdo du Quotidien de l’Art, October 19, 2018, pp. 6-7

Lesauvage, Magali, Eleonore Thery, and Marine Vazzoler, “A la Fiac, une pluie de ventes / At Fiac, une shower of sales,” L’Hebdo du Quotidien de l’Art, October 19, 2018, pp. 6-7

Reyburn, Scott, “In Paris, the Art Scene Is Happening. London Had Better Look Out.,” NYTimes.com, October 19, 2018

In Paris, the Art Scene Is Happening. London Had Better Look Out.

By Scott Reyburn | October 19, 2018 PARIS — October is the month when London and Paris go headto-head, vying with each other to attract collectors to their prestigious contemporary art fairs.

In recent years, London has had the edge, at least in terms of hype.

The Frieze and Frieze Masters fairs have generated far more noise than Paris’s rival, the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain, or FIAC. In addition, the French capital suffered as a visitor destination following the 2015 terror attacks. With a twoweek gap between Frieze and FIAC, most art collectors traveling long distances have to choose between one or the other.

But Paris visitor numbers have “Ingres Wood,” a monumental spray-painted installation by the Berlin-based artist Katharina Grosse, was among the works displayed at the Grand Palais in Paris during the FIAC art fair. Credit 2018 Katharina bounced back. And with Britain’s Grosse und VG Bild-Kunst Bonn; Photograph by Zarko Vijatovic, via Gagosian economy and its art market facing an uncertain future outside the European Union after March, is than an opportunity for FIAC and its week of associated events?

“I don’t like the idea of profiting from others’ misfortunes,” said Jennifer Flay, FIAC’s director since 2010, at a preview on Wednesday. “We’ve been trying to redress perceptions of the French art scene for years,” she added. “It’s taken a while to get things to become more competitive and international.”

President Emmanuel Macron of France seems to scent an opening. The president was scheduled to give a cocktail reception at the Élysée Palace on Friday “in honor of artists and creation” on the occasion of FIAC 2018 including fair exhibitors. No French president has hosted such an event since 1985, according to Ms. Flay.

The 45th edition of FIAC featured 195 galleries from 27 countries. The five-day fair, held in the majestic setting of the Grand Palais, combines contemporary and modern art under one soaring steel-and-glass roof, and attracts about 75,000 visitors, according to the organizers. The Frieze and Frieze Masters fairs, which separate contemporary and modern, each attract 60,000.

Paris is certainly being perceived again as a place to do business by international art dealers. The London and Hong Kong-based gallerist Ben Brown of Ben Brown Fine Arts was one of 18 first-time exhibitors at the fair.

“It feels good here in Paris,” said Mr. Brown, who was offering an array of classic blue-chip works from the 1960s by Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein. “We’re in for a rough time in England.”

Sales at FIAC have a reputation for taking longer than at Frieze, but despite the general air of uncertainty, collectors were making decisions at the preview. By lunchtime, Gagosian had sold more than 10 of the spray-painted works on paper that the Berlin-based artist Katharina Grosse had produced for FIAC, marked at 40,000 to 50,000 euros, or $46,000 to $57,000. Ms. Grosse’s centerpiece was the monumental “Ingres Wood,” a sumptuously pigmented installation of pine trunks on fabric using a recently felled tree planted in Rome by the 19th-century French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. It was priced at €550,000.

Reyburn, Scott, “In Paris, the Art Scene Is Happening. London Had Better Look Out.,” NYTimes.com, October 19, 2018 Notable among FIAC’s confirmed early sales was the $250,000 paid at the booth of the Los Angeles dealer David Kordansky for the 2018 circular cast polyester sculpture “Untitled (Parabolic Lens)”

by Fred Eversley. Mr. Eversley is a former NASAtrained engineer who is included in the current Brooklyn Museum edition of the influential exhibition “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.” The work is a new version of a sculpture originally conceived in 1969.

When it comes to fair venues, FIAC wins hands down over Frieze. The Grand Palais is one of the world’s most spectacular settings for any cultural event. But this signature building will close for renovation soon after the 2020 edition, and will then be used as a venue for the 2024 Paris Olympics. During the renovation period, FIAC will occupy a temporary structure on the Champ de Mars, near the Eiffel Tower, according to Ms. Flay.

Could that move compromise any shift of gravity toward Paris? Possibly. But “FIAC Week,” like “Frieze Week,” is about a lot more than one art fair.

Serious-minded satellite events are another important draw for collectors. London has the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair; Paris has the Paris Internationale and Asia Now fairs, both four years old.

“Untitled (Parabolic Lens),” a cast polyester sculpture by Fred Eversely that sold at the booth of the David Kordansky Gallery at FIAC. The work was originally conceived in 1969. Credit Fred Eversley, via David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles; Photograph by Jeff McLane

Paris Internationale is a pop-up event organized by smaller contemporary galleries seeking to keep costs low. This year’s fair was held in a vacant 19th-century residential building overlooking Parc Monceau in northwest Paris. Forty-two dealers and eight nonprofit ventures squeezed into its rambling domestic spaces. “This is the best of the 10 things I’ve seen since the end of August,” the globe-trotting Belgian collector Alain Servais said at the crowded Tuesday preview. “Dealers are taking risks by bringing artists that have an institutional following, but not a commercial following.”

The reclusive Belgian conceptual artist Jef Geys, for example, who represented Belgium at the 2009 Venice Biennale and who died in February, has an auction high of just $13,125, according to the Artnet price database. At Paris Internationale, Galerie Max Mayer, based in Düsseldorf, Germany, presented Geys’s hauntingly ambiguous black lacquer sculpture, “Schildwachten (Darth Vader).” Dating from the early 1990s, it was priced at €55,000.

At the other end of the price spectrum, on view in a bathroom, 650mAh, a nonprofit based in Hove, England, was showing works by Hendrickje Schimmel, a Dutch contemporary artist who works in London. Ms. Schimmel makes pieces that “exist somewhere between sculpture and product,” questioning the preconceptions of the fashion industry. Unwearable shoe sculptures found no early takers, but an altered found cotton shirt sold for €300.

Meanwhile, around the corner at Asia Now, in another chic residential setting, visitors were putting on headsets to experience the 2018 virtual reality piece “Happily Contained” by the young Chinese digital artist Miao Ying. One of an edition of three, this all-enveloping nightmare of 21st century consumerism was presented by the Paris-based DSLcollection. Another was available, priced at €45,000, from MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai, one of more than 40 Asian and Western galleries at the fair.

Also on display were lyrical collages incorporating vintage photographs by the New York-based Filipino artist Pinky Urmaza.

Eight of these were presented by the Vinyl on Vinyl Gallery of the Philippines. Priced at €650 to €790, they quickly sold out. The sense that there’s plenty happening in the Paris art scene was further reinforced on Thursday with almost 130 art and design dealerships exhibiting at FIAC Week’s annual “Gallery Night.” Freedman Fitzpatrick, a Los Angeles gallery that opened near the Hotel de Ville in February, was showing politically charged sculptures by the young New York artist Diamond Stingily.

“We wanted to have a second gallery in Europe, and we do have a lot of clients in this region,” said Robbie Freedman, a cofounder of the dealership, which was also exhibiting in the first-floor younger galleries section of FIAC. “Paris is a global hub.”

Once Britain, and London, formally leave the European Union next March, Paris looks likely to become an increasingly compelling destination in the art world. It certainly will if Mr. Macron has anything to do with it.

Durón, Maximilíano, “David Kordansky Now Reps Fred Eversley,” ARTnews.com, September 26, 2018

David Kordansky Now Reps Fred Eversley

By Maximilíano Durón | September 26, 2018

Artist Fred Eversley, who is based in New York and Venice, California, is now represented by Los Angeles’s David Kordansky Gallery. He will have his first solo exhibition at the gallery in spring 2019.

Eversley is best-known for his slick, often brightly hued curved sculptures, which he produces in various mediums, including resin, plastic, cast polyester, stainless steel, and bronze. They have an air of ease about them, and are directly informed by Eversley’s deep knowledge of science and technology.

After graduating with a degree in electrical engineering from what is now Carnegie Mellon University, Eversley moved to the L.A. beach town of Venice in the 1960s and Fred Eversley in front of his 1971 Untitled (Parabolic Lens), at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. pursued work as an engineer, collaborating MARIA LARSSON with NASA and aerospace companies in the area. He soon retired from that profession at the age of 25, and began pursuing an art career that was influenced by physics and other sciences. In 1977, he became the first artist-in-residence at the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum.

He went on to become one of the members of the loosely affiliated Southern Californian movement Light and Space. A 1970 solo show at the Whitney Museum in New York propelled him to international renown.

(In 2011, his work featured in three exhibitions across the Getty Foundation’s inaugural Pacific Standard Time initiative, which sought to rectify the exclusion of West Coast artists from the traditional postwar art-historical canon.)

Eversley’s work is currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum in “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” which will travel to the Broad in Los Angeles next year, and in “Space Shifters” at the Hayward Gallery in London. A traveling survey of his work, “Black, White, Gray,” made stops at Art+Practice in L.A.’s Leimert Park neighborhood and at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Fred Eversley, Untitled (parabolic lens), (1969), 2018, twocolor, two-layer cast polyester. JEFF MCLANE/COURTESY DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY, LOS ANGELES, CA

“To be able to work with such a foundational and singular figure in L.A.’s art history is a tremendous honor,” gallerist David Kordansky told ARTnews in an email. “Equal parts art and science, Fred’s work—with a horizonless approach to the fundamental pleasures of perception—embodies the universal promise of Southern California: its light and space and its radical free-thinking.”

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Fred Eversley, 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, with texts by Fred Eversley, Aaron De Groft, and John T. Spike, Williamsburg: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2017, pp. 1-45.

Carlock, Marty, “Fred Eversley,” Sculpture, Vol. 36, July/August 2017, pp. 73

“Harmonic Convergence,” Crystal Bridges Member Magazine, August 2017, Vol VI, pp. 4-10

“Harmonic Convergence,” Crystal Bridges Member Magazine, August 2017, Vol VI, pp. 4-10

“Harmonic Convergence,” Crystal Bridges Member Magazine, August 2017, Vol VI, pp. 4-10

“Harmonic Convergence,” Crystal Bridges Member Magazine, August 2017, Vol VI, pp. 4-10

“Harmonic Convergence,” Crystal Bridges Member Magazine, August 2017, Vol VI, pp. 4-10

“Harmonic Convergence,” Crystal Bridges Member Magazine, August 2017, Vol VI, pp. 4-10

“Harmonic Convergence,” Crystal Bridges Member Magazine, August 2017, Vol VI, pp. 4-10

Barliant, Claire, “Fred Eversley’s Black, White, Grey,” BombMagazine.org, May 28, 2017

Fred Eversley’s Black, White, Grey

By Claire Barliant

Art writers and curators often do somersaults to avoid talking about “energy” or any other New Age-y terms that may arise when writing about the California-based Light and Space movement. Light and Space has much in common with its East Coast cousin, Minimalism: stark, geometric forms made from industrial materials like luminous plastic, often polished to high-gloss effect.

But while Minimalist artists resolutely rejected any possibility of illusion during the ’60s and ’70s, Light and Space artists had a more relaxed relationship to the oddities of perception.

Still, curators steer the focus toward the production of these works rather than delve into any potential mystical or cosmic associations.

Fred Eversley. Untitled, 1974, cast polyester resin. All images courtesy of the artist and Rose Art Museum. Photo by Joshua White.

And I get it—the manufacture of these works is intriguing, since sculptures by John McCracken or Larry Bell look less like things made by human hands than monolithic alien spacecraft of the like seen in sci-fi movies such as Kubrick’s 2001 and, more recently, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival.

This elegantly compact exhibition at the Rose brings together thirteen works by Fred Eversley made from polished resin during the mid-to-late ’70s. Of these, the most striking are six identically sized discs—each with a diameter of twenty inches.

Resting on pedestals that put the works on eye level, the discs, which are untitled, have a fetishistic vibe—they reminded me of ancient Celtic talismans. Some discs are concave: two have a transparent membrane at their center, while three others have been completely hollowed out, leaving apertures of various sizes.

Leaning down to look through an opening in one of the discs, which Eversley calls “lenses,” I could imagine a Stonehenge scenario in which they line up with the setting sun. Although the show is titled Black, White, Grey, in reference to the monochromatic neutral color scheme, this title almost seems like dry commentary— since the rich shades and hues are more akin to rare materials such as dense ebony, ivory, and rose gold.

Of all the Light and Space artists, Brooklynborn Eversley may have the most street cred

Model—Parabolic Flight, 1977, anodized aluminum. Photo by Joshua White.

Barliant, Claire, “Fred Eversley’s Black, White, Grey,” BombMagazine.org, May 28, 2017

Installation view of Fred Eversley: Black, White, Gray, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts. Photo by Charles Mayer.

when it comes to the physics of light and space. He moved to Los Angeles to work in the aerospace industry in 1964 and, after realizing that landlords were turning him away because of his skin color, he landed in the bohemian, integrated neighborhood of Venice Beach. It wasn’t long before his artist neighbors such as Bell, James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and McCracken began pestering him for advice on technical problems, and Eversley eventually abandoned engineering for art.

Eversley casts his work by using, according to curator Kim Conaty’s brochure essay, a “salvaged turntable that produced casings for the first atomic bombs.” There is something chilling but also rebellious in using equipment built to make weapons of mass destruction to make fine art instead.

Three of the other works in the show are wall-mounted crescent shapes composed of small pieces of resin, two of them made from alternating pieces of black and white resin. Slender and delicate in appearance, but also long (the largest is almost 100 inches tall), they resemble giant feathers. Another work made from layered pieces of black resin is pyramidal in shape.

All seem dreamy and strange, inviting your gaze to linger and your mind to wander. When Eversley made these works, he wanted to evoke “stars expanding their energy and becoming black holes, white dwarfs, and neutron stars.” If you’re fantasizing about life in other realms, Eversley’s work may be just the ticket.

Swenson, Kirsten, “Fred Eversley,” ArtInAmericaMagazine.com, May 26, 2017

FRED EVERSLEY

WALTHAM, at the Rose Art Museum

Kirsten Swenson | December 14, 2017

When I visited this exhibition of thirteen works by Fred Eversley, the black, white, and gray polyester resin and acrylic sculptures that serve as the show’s focus reflected the New England winter sun with scintillating brilliance. Made between 1974 and 1980 by the Los Angeles–based artist, the objects here feel like transplants, born of the Southern California sun and perhaps having captured a bit of that radiance within.

The high shine of the works is attuned to the concept of energy—the properties of light, the mechanics of solar energy, and the transcendental quality of energy as life itself. The parabolic lens, with its capacity to reflect light toward its focus, is the leitmotif of the show, and indeed of Eversley’s career. A few of the sculptures on view are milky white or translucent black concave lenses that are densely pigmented at their thick perimeter walls and thin to a transparent, glassy central oculus, and a few are open rings of opaque gray or pinkish white.

These various pieces lure the spectator to gaze through them while also taking in the inverted reflections they produce along their curving surfaces.

The phenomenal effects are familiar—think of Dan Graham’s pavilions or Robert Irwin’s acrylic columns. “Seeing yourself seeing,” in the words of Eversley’s Light and Space comrade James Turrell. But unlike the encompassing, environmentally scaled works that Eversley’s contemporaries made, his objects are intimate. They concentrate Space Age optimism in shiny, perfect forms suggestive of Brancusi sculptures. Three works in the exhibition consist of halves of cylinders that have been sliced at an acute angle, the wedges (mostly shown individually, though in one instance displayed as a pair) standing upright so that the edges of the cut surfaces form parabolas that shoot upward and then back down.

As an aerospace engineer during the Cold War, Eversley was cognizant of the implications of energy stored and deployed.

He made the lenses using the centrifugal force of a repurposed turntable that had produced the casings for the first atomic bombs. Drawn to the bohemianism of Venice Beach, he redirected his technological and material investigations toward art; his meticulously polished forms were in dialogue with those by “finish fetish” figures with whom he worked and exhibited, such as Larry Bell and John McCracken, though his concerns are more deeply rooted in the physics and metaphysics of light. He made four of the show’s sculptures during a residency at the National Air and Space Museum in the late 1970s.

Lacking the proper ventilation to work with liquid polyester, Eversley constructed these sculptures using precast pieces of acrylic. Two consist of triangular pieces layered and hinged to produce wall-bound arcs that evoke spinal columns of large beasts; a third—the only non-parabolic work on view—is a pyramid made from slabs of black acrylic. Despite Eversley’s technologically advanced material, these sculptures suggest ancient remains.

Eversley was the only African American participant in the Light and Space movement. The exhibition was curated by Kim Conaty of the Rose in partnership with Art + Practice, Mark Bradford’s art and education center in Los Angeles, where the show debuted last fall. At the Rose, which is located on the campus of Brandeis University, the show is the latest in a series of exhibitions of African American abstractionists of Eversley’s generation, including Jack Whitten and Melvin Edwards. These are major artists who, like Eversley, have not been viewed as central figures in their respective milieus, a misrepresentation that the Rose seeks to correct without introducing the polemics of race. Exquisitely installed in the Rose’s 1960s-era Brutalist jewel-box gallery, flooded with natural light from plate glass windows, Eversley’s exhibition is exemplary: meditative, harmonious with the historical architecture, and stridently contemporary.

McQuaid, Cate, “At the Rose, oracular sleekness and a very different Sahara,” BostonGlobe.com, March 8, 2017

At the Rose, oracular sleekness and a very different Sahara Cate McQuaid | March 8, 2017

WALTHAM — Fred Eversley, the subject of a minimalist, cosmic show at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, started out in life as an aerospace engineer. His sleek sculptures, crafted and finished with precision, have the lean economy of industrial design.

But these works don’t belong on a spacecraft — except, perhaps, to signal to an alien species the breadth of human consciousness. They are oracular. Their interplay of reflection and transparency and their elegant, straightforward forms hint that if you were to stare into one long enough, it might deliver divination.

In the mid 1960s, Eversley gave up his job at California’s Wyle Laboratories to become a sculptor.

He was 25. By 1970, he had a solo show at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. The Rose exhibition, “Fred Eversley: Black, White, Gray,” spotlights work the artist made in the 1970s.

Eversley found his technique quickly, casting liquid polyester resin to first make gleaming, translucent blocks, cones, and arcs, then the wondrous parabolic circles he calls lenses. He formed round pieces with centrifugal force, on a huge turntable that once produced casings for atomic bombs.

The warm, sunny tones you’d expect from an artist working in Venice Beach washed through these early sculptures.

Neighbors of his there included John McCracken and Larry Bell, artists in California’s Light and Space movement, of which James Turrell is the patron saint. They aimed to make viewers aware of the process of seeing. The art was less about the object and more about its effect on the eye, the brain, and the spirit. Eversley fit right in. McCracken gave the young sculptor a can of black paint, “Untitled” is among the works by Fred Eversley on display at Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. and the work that sprang from that companionable gesture makes up this show. Eversley set aside the seductions of emeralds, wine reds, and honeyed yellows for a starker palette. These sculptures may be less intoxicating, but they are commanding, taking on life, death, and cosmology. The black pieces mirror, confront, and suck you in; black holes come to mind. White ones cradle and comfort. Gray ones are shrouds, sometimes parting to reveal whatever lies beyond.

The show’s installation, orchestrated by Rose curator Kim Conaty, is a marvel. Look through one work at an array of other ones (they are all untitled), and that frame shifts things: Suddenly, you’re not appraising objects in a gallery, but viewing another world, one both distant and intimate. The lenses act as gyres into the imagination. They stand on edge. In one suite of three, a nearly open gray circle sits between a black concave lens and a white one. The glossy inward slopes of the outer two slide us right to their centers, where the pigment clears. These small openings prompt the gaze of a spy through a keyhole, or a scientist through a scope. We’re discovering a world within. Peer through the black one, and the others resemble a lineup of planets. The wall sculpture beyond, a black-and-white arc, might be a falling star. The world within is galactic. Two arcing wall works have graceful, muscular lines, but they lack the lenses’ grip and sweep. The slender, sliced wedges of cylinders in another group, however, resemble small monoliths, sites of contemplation and worship. As with the lenses, translucency and mirroring make these objects magnetic — pulling us in, pushing us out, beckoning us through.

From Eversley’s show, I went to the video projection that anchors “Tommy Hartung: King Solomon’s Mines,” the show in the Lower Rose Gallery. The first thing I saw was a lens encircling a glass sphere. “The eye is a two-way street,” a voice intoned. I felt I had slipped into one of Eversley’s black holes, and was now tumbling fast into a hot, frenetic alternative universe. Hartung crafts epic videos with animation and both original and found footage, and this one is an onslaught. It’s the second in a planned trio of King Solomon videos, which use the wealthy and wise biblical king as a springboard for themes of class and power. It’s set in the remote Tibesti region of the Sahara Desert, where human trafficking perversely crosses paths with high-end tourism.

The exhibition is called “King Solomon’s Mines,” but the video’s title card reads “King Solomon’s Minds.” That fits: Hartung ricochets from one surreal image to the next, suggesting tenuously tethered dreams — not just of one man, but of society. He uses the rubble of old myths to build a new one. The narrator, an authoritative basso, warns against jinns, demons in Arab cultures. Jinns get under your skin, spark wicked impulses. The voice-over narration is incantatory and occasionally garbled, ruminating on robots, dance clubs, and the evil eye. I found it hard to follow as my eyes gobbled up the audacious visuals. Hartung scratches over some of his frames, electrifying images with staticky lines and smears of acidic color. If a finished painting could unfold over time, it would look like this: smudgy, abrasive, brilliant. We’re in a Land Rover speeding through the desert, then watching a child with fernlike appendages grapple up a steep incline; we’re listening to a turbaned man with a cloud-filled blue sky for a face.

It’s a breakneck video, gorgeous and confounding. I watched it twice, and could probably have seen it 10 times before it would coalesce. That’s OK. Dreamtime has its own logic, and it takes patience to feel your way into it.

Cook, Greg, “How Fred Eversley Went From NASA Engineer To Cosmic Artist In ‘60s LA,” wbur.org, March 8, 2017

How Fred Eversley Went From NASA Engineer To Cosmic Artist In ‘60s LA Greg Cook | March 8, 2017

Fred Eversely at his exhibit “Black, White, Gray” at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum. (Greg Cook/WBUR)

It wasn’t clear that night in January 1967 when Fred Eversley walked out of work that he was heading toward a turning point in his life. He was a rocket scientist — technically a senior instrumentation engineer for the aerospace firm Wyle Laboratories in El Segundo, California — designing and supervising construction of testing facilities for NASA’s Gemini and Apollo programs, the work leading up to the moon landings beginning two years later.

But by the end of 1967, Eversley would instead be on the path to becoming a major sculptor, known for creating translucent plastic discs, concave on one side like lenses, with hues of violet and amber and blue that can bring to mind sunsets and outer space. His very first solo exhibition would be at New York’s prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970. He’d be named the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s first artist-in-residence in 1977. Today, his sculptures are recorded in art history books and featured in the collections of museums all across the country. And he’s now the subject of “Fred Eversley: Black, White, Gray,” an exhibition at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum in Waltham through June 11.

But on that January night in 1967, Eversely had just returned to Los Angeles after celebrating the holidays in New York, where he grew up. He had gotten a big promotion, so he’d bought himself a new three-piece suit that he was wearing on his first day back to work. He oversaw dozens of people on projects that did things like create labs to blast the components of spacecraft with intense sound to mimic the environment of space, especially the ship’s screaming reentry into earth’s atmosphere. He regularly worked long days, but to catch up after being off for two weeks, this day he put in an especially long day of 14 hours. He finally went out into the parking lot to head home around 11:30 that night. Only two cars were left: the company president’s Aston Martin and “my funky MG.” But his car’s engine wouldn’t start. So he attempted a “push start,” sitting at the steering wheel with his foot hanging out of the open driver’s door to push against the pavement, hoping the forward motion would help the engine catch. It slipped his mind that there was a telephone pole in the parking lot. Until his door crashed into it. “It closed the open door on my leg, breaking my leg and thigh,” Eversley recalls. “I couldn’t control the car. It rolled to the edge of the parking lot, then down a gully and out of view.”

“I came very, very close to dying,” he says. He blinked the headlights and honked the MG’s horn trying to get someone’s — anyone’s — attention. After some time, the company president, Frank Wyle, returned from a card game with company vice presidents and, luckily, was sober enough to realize something was terribly wrong. Wyle called the fire department. “They took me to the local county hospital where the doctor on-call never answered the call to come in and the nurse wouldn’t give me anything,” Eversley says. So he called his (then) girlfriend, who got back in touch with Wyle, who called his own orthopedic surgeon, waking him up at his Beverly Hills home around 3 in the morning. They moved Eversley to Cedars-Sinai Hospital.

“We’ll save your life,” the doctor told him. “We’re not sure we can save your leg.”

Cook, Greg, “How Fred Eversley Went From NASA Engineer To Cosmic Artist In ‘60s LA,” wbur.org, March 8, 2017

‘I Was Always Interested In Energy’ Science and engineering ran in Eversley’s family.

Fred Eversley was born in 1941, the oldest of four siblings, and grew up in Brooklyn and Queens, New York. His ancestry includes African-Americans, German Jews, Shinnecock Indians and the son of Martha Washington.

His mother, Beatrice, was a New York schoolteacher. Her father, John Syphax, who lived nearby, was a pioneer of photography and an inventor, who kept around old radios and other gadgets from the 1910s and ‘20s that fascinated Eversley as a boy.

Eversley’s father, Frederick W. Eversley Jr., was born in Barbados, moved to New York with his family when he was 3, rose to develop jet airplanes and then make headlines as the “black contractor” named “engineer-ofFred Eversley’s untitled 1974 cast polyester resin lens (right) in the exhibit “Black, White, Gray,” an exhibition at the-year.” He ran “one of the largest construcBrandeis University’s Rose Art Museum. (Greg Cook/WBUR) tion businesses with minority-group ownership in the New York area,” according to The New York Times. They built banks, churches, apartment buildings, an IBM factory, and an exhibit at the Bronx Zoo that was home to nocturnal animals.

“I always had a large workshop where I did my experiments in the basement of my parents’ house,” Eversley says. “I was always interested in energy — wind energy, water energy, solar energy.” He got an amateur radio license at age 8 and used it to converse with people about science, radio and photography via Morse code. He attended Brooklyn Tech High School, then studied electrical engineering at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, graduating in 1963. “I never sat in classrooms with a kid of a minority of any sort from kindergarten to university,” Eversley says. “The whole time I was an engineer, I never worked with another black engineer ever. … I was the only black in my corporation.”

After finishing at Carnegie Mellon, Eversley planned to study bio-medical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

But his (then) girlfriend had signed up to study painting in Mexico. He craved to spend the summer with her, but his parents were against it and wouldn’t provide travel money. One of his college fraternity brothers was the son of Frank Wyle, the president of the California aerospace engineering firm Wyle Laboratories. “In desperation,” he called the company executive and asked for a financial advance in exchange for pledging to work for his firm for six to 12 months. “If you’re schmuck enough to do it, I’m schmuck enough to send you the money,” Eversley recalls Wyle telling him. So Eversley tagged along with his girlfriend and pretended to study mural painting. “I went and looked at the wall almost every day,” he says. “I never did a thing. But at the end of the day, I signed the wall.”

Venice Beach Eversley arrived in Los Angeles in 1964 and began working with Wyle Laboratories on projects for the French atomic energy commission, the European space agency, a U.S. weapons lab in Virginia, and NASA. With a Jewish friend, he tried to find a place where they could live together.

His roommate would go out during the day and track down five or six possible rentals, but when Eversley went back with him in the evening, suddenly all the places were no longer available. A white co-worker finally clued him in — the problem was racist landlords didn’t want to rent to the African-American engineer.

So they ended up in Venice Beach. “It was the only beachfront community I was able to rent in,” Eversley says. “It was the only integrated beach community.” Venice Beach in those days was basically Greenwich Village moved west,” Eversley says. “It was the remnants of the Beats and jazz people, John Coltrane and Miles Davis. Dexter Gordon had already split from his wife and moved to Denmark, but his ex-wife and two daughters lived right next to me.”

The neighborhood was also home to Jim Morrison and other members of the band The Doors (Morrison wrote the first drafts of “The End” while hiding out under the nearby Santa Monica Pier) as well as blues guitarist Taj Mahal and the band Canned Heat. “Everyone went passing through, including Janis Joplin,” Eversley says. “In spare time that I had and on weekends, I’d hang out with my neighbors, including [artists] Larry Bell, Jim Turrell, Ed Moses, Bob Irwin, as well as John McCracken, John Altoon and Charles Mattox. And as an engineer, I would help them do little things, technical things.”

Cook, Greg, “How Fred Eversley Went From NASA Engineer To Cosmic Artist In ‘60s LA,” wbur.org, March 8, 2017

The Los Angeles art scene was on the rise in the 1960s. Rico Lebrun, whom Everesley was introduced to by the Wyles when he moved to California, gained prominence there as a cubist-inspired, “abject expressionist” painter (in curator Michael Duncan’s artful phrasing) in the decade following World War II. (Lebrun also tutored Disney animators in drawing, especially those working on “Bambi.”) During the 1950s, flat, hardedged, geometric abstract painting by John McLaughlin, Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg came to the fore. But all of these artists struggled to gain notice outside California.

That began to shift in the 1960s as California artists developed pop and minimalist styles with a local flavor influenced by the local climate, custom car culture, surfing, Hollywood, Disneyland, and the new plastics coming out of the aerospace industry that arose along the West Coast to fight World War II and continued to thrive during the Cold War — and employ Eversley. Venice Beach, “to be there, in ’67, ’68, ’69, with what’s going on in the world, I imagine that place being freedom,” says Kim Conaty, the Rose Art Museum curator who organized “Fred Eversley: Black, White, Gray.” Eversley “talks about the energy, but he also says you could do everything. Rent was really cheap. You could try something and fail and be OK.” In studios in Venice Beach and next door in Santa Monica, Robert Irwin and James Turrell pioneered what became known as “Light and Space” art, making sculptures and installations in which the objects seemed to dematerialize, becoming immersive environments of light and shadow and glowing color. Larry Bell moved from painting geometric abstractions to fashioning glass and mirror cubes. Moses made abstract paintings. McCracken crafted resin-coated planks that looked like they’d just been dipped in glossy paint — part of what became known as “Finish Fetish” art. Altoon made paintings that could be the love child of Arshile Gorky’s doodley surrealist abstractions and Playboy cartoons. Mattox constructed kinetic sculptures — mechanical devices that moved — such as a box with L-shaped bars on top that rocked back and forth. Ideas cross-pollinated through this Venice Beach art world of ambitious white guys (one 1964 group exhibition including Irwin and Moses was called “The Studs”) as they chatted and taught each other skills and competed. And the world — outside California, in New York even — began to take notice. The Ferus Gallery, Dwan Gallery and the Pasadena Art Museum championed new California art and brought in prominent New York and French modernists — creating relationships among artists, curators and collectors that helped raise the international profile of the Californians.

Eversely rubbed shoulders with these artists at studios, exhibition openings and museum receptions. There he met major New York artists — Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Carl Andre — and collectors. “LA is small. So all the museum directors, all the museum curators are all at these parties,” he says. After these bohemian escapades, Eversley says, “I put on a tie and jacket every day and went to the office.”

The First Technologist Which is where he was when he crashed his car and broke his leg on that night in January 1967. The surgeon thought he could save Eversley’s life, but maybe not his leg. Eversley says, “They managed to save both.”

His injuries left him on crutches for 13 months. “The moment I had my accident, Charles [Mattox] said, ‘Why don’t you move into my loft.’ He had an empty loft in his studio. ‘I’ll give you free rent for helping me with my art.’ His [kinetic] sculptures were famous for falling apart,” Eversley jokes. Inspired by the Experiments in Art and Technology project that Rauschenberg and engineer Billy Kluver started in New York, Mattox had launched similar collaborations between artists and scientists. Eversley says, “I was the first technologist.”

“My [Wyle] job kept me out of Vietnam — critical skills deferment,” Eversley notes. The year of recovery from the accident, “took me over my 26th birthday, which took me past the magic age in those days not to be drafted.”

So he left Wyle, moved in with Mattox, and began making art — “experiments,” he called them. He cast resin into rectangles with photos and electronics embedded inside. “I was transmitting the energy to these flat rectangles by way of radio waves,” Eversley says.

“While I was at NASA, I got this enormous box of rejects, these miniature neon lights that were made for Apollo that were perfectly fine except they didn’t meet the rigid requirements for space. … When I transmitted radio energy at them, they glowed.”

But he had trouble making the electronics work consistently and “I couldn’t nicely em-

Fred Eversley’s untitled 1974 cast polyester resin lens (center) in the exhibit “Black, White, Gray,” an exhibition at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum. (Greg Cook/WBUR)

Cook, Greg, “How Fred Eversley Went From NASA Engineer To Cosmic Artist In ‘60s LA,” wbur.org, March 8, 2017

bed the photos into the plastic,” he says. Altoon and McCracken, who had studios nearby, would stop by “with some little problems” that he would help them sort out. He showed them what he was working on. “Forget the electronics. Forget the photographs,” Altoon said.

“Those little pieces of yours are fantastic.”

Six months after Eversley moved into Mattox’s studio, Mattox left for Albuquerque, to teach at the University of New Mexico, “and he never came back.” With the space to himself, Eversley focused on casting his resin sculptures. He moved onto space-capsule shapes. Then he cast resin inside a foot-wide pipe he spun around a horizontal axis on Mattox’s lathe. “I pour in liquid plastic and I cast a tube,” Eversley says. The centripetal forces pushed the resin to the outside of the pipe. He cast it in layers, from the outside in -- violet, amber, blue.

“When they’re first cast, they almost look like soap. They’re really, really rough,” Conaty says. Eversley sanded and polished them until they gleamed. “The difficult part,” he says, “is the polishing, which is 99 percent of the work.” Sometimes he left the sculptures as tubes, sometimes he sliced them thinly to create translucent, curved wedges. “That work is the basis for my first one-man show at the Whitney in ’70,” Eversley says. “And immediately after that I started experimenting — well, I had been trying — in casting about the vertical axis.” Eversley’s studio neighbor Altoon died from a heart attack at age 43 in early 1969, and his widow Babs let Eversley take over the lease of his studio, just a few blocks from the beach, with its interior designed by their friend, the (now) celebrated architect Frank Gehry. (“I’m still there,” Eversley says. “It’s still a rental.”)

Fred Eversley’s untitled 1974 cast polyester resin lens (center) in the exhibit “Black, White, Gray,” an exhibition at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum. (Greg Cook/WBUR)

Working and living there, Eversley rigged a variable-speed motor to a potter’s wheel, allowing him to spin his castings around a vertical axis and create shapes with larger diameters. Out of this he developed his signature sculptures — translucent discs of radiant color. They’re usually about 20 inches across and up to 7 inches deep, flat on one side and concave on the other, sometimes with the resin thinning to a hole in the center. With their saturated hues — deep blues, reds, yellows, amber browns — and holes, they can bring to mind giant Life Savers candy.

“They’re fascinating as these engineered things,” Conaty says. But they’re also “jewel like. … It’s basically plastic, but he creates these lenslike sculptures that are intimate in a way, that are human scale, that encourage you to look and see yourself reflected in them. A lot of people see them as these sci-fi objects, these orbs,” Conaty says. “Going from the horizontal to the vertical allowed me to create perfect parabolic shapes,” Eversley says. “The parabola happens to be the only mathematic shape that concentrates all forms of known energy to the same single focal point.” “I’ve always been interested in the subject of energy, in the narrow scientific sense and in the broader metaphysical sense,” Eversley says.

“Don’t forget the ‘60s and the ‘70s were the New Age years. So I was surrounded by the I Ching and this and that. I did everything everyone around me did.”

Eversley goes on, “The beach” — Venice Beach — “is all about energy. It’s the wind, the rain, the sun, the waves. You’re surrounded by the presence of energy. You’re also surrounded by everyone who comes to the beach, which ends up being — with very few exceptions — in a very positive, energetic state. I’m not claiming it was even all that conscious,” Eversley says. “All the artists that lived in that atmosphere — [the painter] Richard Diebenkorn with his stuff — everyone if you thought of it, the beach influenced them. The musicians sat on the beach and blew out sounds to the sunset and they blew out some positive sounds. … I had all my scientific knowledge and all my years of sitting in my parents’ basement laboratory and Carnegie Mellon, but you’re in this atmosphere with that background. I always considered that energy and how to harness that energy to make people happy.”

Make Some Black Art Eversley’s sculptures are often grouped with the “Finish Fetish” and “Light and Space” art emerging from Venice Beach — art that has been seen as apolitical. But Los Angeles artists were also producing some of the most politically charged American art of the 1960s and ‘70s. Betye Saar, David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy and other African-American artists around Los Angeles recycled found materials into assemblage sculptures — some of them even salvaging wreckage from the six-day Watts Rebellion/Riots in 1965 — that spoke about racism, civil rights and being black.

Cook, Greg, “How Fred Eversley Went From NASA Engineer To Cosmic Artist In ‘60s LA,” wbur.org, March 8, 2017

These artworks were cousins to the assemblage sculptures Ed Kienholz, Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner and other white California artists had been making since the 1950s — often addressing the politics of the time, from fears of nuclear annihilation (part of what California’s aerospace industry was working on) to illegal, back alley abortions. The nun Sister Corita Kent riled Los Angeles’ Roman Catholic leadership with pop art screenprints that celebrated her faith, opposed the Vietnam war, and pushed for civil rights. Los Angeles was one of the birthplaces of feminist art, with artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro launching the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, just north of LA, in 1971.

In his art, Eversley generally remained apart from these political developments, despite social pressure to be more obviously engaged. Instead he was in a category with Al Loving and Sam Gilliam — the rare African-American artists of the 1960s and ‘70s who found success in abstraction.

To this day, it remains unusual for the top echelons of the white-dominated Western fine art world to embrace artists of color if they don’t make art that speaks about their racial identities.

Eversley has long and strongly resisted being pigeonholed as an African-American artist. “There’s certainly been criticism of me for not making art that talks about the black experience. ... I just keep doing what I do,” he says. “It’s not about being black.”

But in 1972, Eversley left the reds and violets and amber hues behind for a time and began making black discs, the starting point for his “Black, White, Gray” exhibition at Brandeis’ Rose Art Museum. He “began to explore the qualities and beauty of the color black,” Conaty writes.

Eversley says he arrived at his initial violets and ambers by chance: “They’re arbitrary colors. Two of the colors had been sitting on the shelf in Charlie’s studio when I walked in the door. I think I bought one more, the blue.”

His black sculptures, he says, began as a sort of joke about the pressure for him to make art about being African-American. “John McCracken at the time was doing black planks and decided he had made black sculptures long enough and he gave me has can [of black pigment],” Eversley says. “McCracken said, ‘You’re being heavily criticized for not making black art. Make some black art.’”

“When he gave me that can, I didn’t use it the next day,” Eversley says. “It sat there for a year. My first [black] piece, I used it because I messed up a casting and I wanted to save the work. But it came out very interesting.”

The black was luxurious and glimmering and sensual. Conaty says, “There was a real magic in the black that he hadn’t anticipated. It’s totally different because it’s no longer transparent,” Eversley says. “Now you’re dealing with a mirror, with some translucency in the center, but basically a mirror.”

He’d done four or five black pieces and then, so the story goes, when his white studio assistant joked that he should make white ones too for white folks, Eversley began making milky white discs. And then cloudy gray ones too because, he jokes, “I’m half black and half white.”

So black and white and gray are just a gag?

Eversley says he was also thinking in cosmic terms, but not about race: “I was very much talking about black holes and white dwarfs.”

But Conaty says, “There is absolutely a component to those works that relates to identity.”

The sculptures seem to ask: How do you attribute meaning to color? They seem to ask: When an African-American artist uses the color black, must you see it in terms of race?

“When he made the first good black lens, some people who knew him began to say, ‘Whether you understand it or not, these are your most important works,’” Conaty says. “I think he recognized the power of color, how people read it, how it resonates with their expectations, and how he might play with that.”

Fred Eversley polishes a sculpture in 1970. (Courtesy of the artist)

“Fred Eversley,” African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era and Beyond, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2012, pp. 89-91

“Fred Eversley,” African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era and Beyond, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2012, pp. 89-91

“Fred Eversley,” African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era and Beyond, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2012, pp. 89-91

“Post/Minimalism and Performance: Fred Eversley,” Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, Los Angeles: University of California, 2011, pp. 264-271, 310

“Post/Minimalism and Performance: Fred Eversley,” Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, Los Angeles: University of California, 2011, pp. 264-271, 310

“Post/Minimalism and Performance: Fred Eversley,” Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, Los Angeles: University of California, 2011, pp. 264-271, 310

“Post/Minimalism and Performance: Fred Eversley,” Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, Los Angeles: University of California, 2011, pp. 264-271, 310

“Post/Minimalism and Performance: Fred Eversley,” Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, Los Angeles: University of California, 2011, pp. 264-271, 310

“Post/Minimalism and Performance: Fred Eversley,” Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, Los Angeles: University of California, 2011, pp. 264-271, 310

“Post/Minimalism and Performance: Fred Eversley,” Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, Los Angeles: University of California, 2011, pp. 264-271, 310

“Post/Minimalism and Performance: Fred Eversley,” Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, Los Angeles: University of California, 2011, pp. 264-271, 310

“Post/Minimalism and Performance: Fred Eversley,” Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, Los Angeles: University of California, 2011, pp. 264-271, 310

Dawkins, Wayne, “Frederick Eversley,” The International Review of African American Art, 2011,pp. 28- 32

Dawkins, Wayne, “Frederick Eversley,” The International Review of African American Art, 2011,pp. 28- 32

Dawkins, Wayne, “Frederick Eversley,” The International Review of African American Art, 2011,pp. 28- 32

Dawkins, Wayne, “Frederick Eversley,” The International Review of African American Art, 2011,pp. 28- 32

Dawkins, Wayne, “Frederick Eversley,” The International Review of African American Art, 2011,pp. 28- 32

FRED EVERSELY FOUR DECADES: 1970-2010

WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY BERGAMOT STATION ARTS CENTER 2525 MICHIGAN AVE., E-1 SANTA MONICA, CA 90404 P 310-453-0909 F 310-453-0908 www.williamturnergallery.com

FRED EVERSLEY: THE DANCE OF SEEING

By Peter Frank

As light-and-space as they come, Fred Eversley’s sculptures distinguish themselves from those of his colleagues and compeers by their refusal to disappear. While others involved in the creation of “perceptualist” objects play with the limits of our eyesight, causing us to struggle after the edges, the limits, even the basic shapes of the things we are seeing, Eversley – without pandering to our need for boundaries – provides us clear-cut shapes and definite colors. Or seems to. It is in fact the shapes and colors themselves that beguile us, not simply for their beauty or elegance, but for their ethereality. If they do not vanish before our eyes, they do not stand still before them, either. They engulf and re-frame their surroundings, like lenses that become part of our sense of things.

As Eversley puts it, his art has, from the start, been concerned “with seeing the world through the pieces, not looking at an object.”

Eversley is in fact concerned less with the apparent presence or absence of his sculptures than with the conditions of our encounter with them. Their proportions carefully calibrated – according to parabolic relationships, despite their normally circular composition (he calls the parabola “the perfect concentrator of all forms of energy”) – his disks and other structures are calculated to invite closer inspection, luring us into discovering their secondary properties. Their reflectivity and transparency, the qualities of their color, even the abilities of many works to distort, magnify, and extend our hearing, are all conditions – not just qualities, but conditions, circumstances that depend on the materials from which the objects have been forged, the processes involved in those forgings, the spaces the objects occupy, and the relative position – and engagement – of the viewer. They encourage such engagement, but do not clamor for it or trick us into it; the full range of their magic is available only to those who take the time to explore them and come to regard them as more than room adornment.

“I try to make art that’s kinetic,” Eversley observes, making objects that “change appearance by the angle of the light and the angle of the observer.” In this regard, he draws not only upon the examples of his fellow light-and-space sculptors, but on those of the overtly kinetic sculptors who were prominent as he began his career and forged his aesthetic. Charles Mattox thus provided Eversley as significant a model as did DeWain Valentine, John McCracken, or Robert Irwin; and even the translucent abstract Ocean Park paintings of Richard Diebenkorn suggested to Eversley the beauty and mystery of “seeing the world through the pieces.”

Eversley’s sculptures, then, serve to alter our perception of the world not so much by challenging our sense of the presence of the sculptures themselves, but by challenging our sense of the ordinary phenomena in whose midst they sit – and by making us aware that we ourselves are responsible for changing that sense. As we move in relation to a sculpture, nearing the alluring concavity of one of its membranes or moving from one tympanum to the other or even studying the structure itself from its side, we see the rest of the room and the rest of the atmosphere pulled in and out of a deep, smoky hue or precisely described oval or upended reflection. Nothing is as it once seemed. It is our kinesis that makes the sculpture kinetic and, through the sculpture, makes the room kinetic, the sculpture’s optical qualities conspiring to choreograph our environments in concert with our movement.

Framing our dance with the world, Fred Eversley’s sculptures make their sites specific to themselves – and to us.

Los Angeles-New York October 2011

Parabolic Flight, 1980, Miami International Airport, Miami Fl., Mirror Polished Stainless and Neon, 15’w x 15’d x 35’h

Jones, Kellie, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,” Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006, pp. 14-34

Jones, Kellie, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,” Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006, pp. 14-34

Jones, Kellie, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,” Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006, pp. 14-34

Jones, Kellie, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,” Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006, pp. 14-34

Jones, Kellie, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,” Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006, pp. 14-34

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Energy/Experimentation

Jones, Kellie, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,” Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006, pp. 14-34

Jones, Kellie, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,” Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006, pp. 14-34

Jones, Kellie, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,” Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006, pp. 14-34

Jones, Kellie, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,” Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006, pp. 14-34

Jones, Kellie, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,” Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006, pp. 14-34

Jones, Kellie, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,” Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006, pp. 14-34

Jones, Kellie, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,” Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006, pp. 14-34

Jones, Kellie, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,” Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006, pp. 14-34

Jones, Kellie, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,” Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006, pp. 14-34

Jones, Kellie, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,” Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006, pp. 14-34

Jones, Kellie, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,” Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006, pp. 14-34

Jones, Kellie, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,” Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006, pp. 14-34

Jones, Kellie, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,” Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006, pp. 14-34

Jones, Kellie, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,” Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006, pp. 14-34

Morgan, Robert C., “Fred Eversley’s Eternal Delight,” Fred Eversley, Washington, D.C.: Osuna Art Gallery, 2004, pp. 3-5

Morgan, Robert C., “Fred Eversley’s Eternal Delight,” Fred Eversley, Washington, D.C.: Osuna Art Gallery, 2004, pp. 3-5

Morgan, Robert C., “Fred Eversley’s Eternal Delight,” Fred Eversley, Washington, D.C.: Osuna Art Gallery, 2004, pp. 3-5

Eversley, Fred, “Life is Energy,” Fred Eversley, Washington, D.C.: Osuna Art Gallery, 2004, pp. 6-8

Eversley, Fred, “Life is Energy,” Fred Eversley, Washington, D.C.: Osuna Art Gallery, 2004, pp. 6-8

Eversley, Fred, “Life is Energy,” Fred Eversley, Washington, D.C.: Osuna Art Gallery, 2004, pp. 6-8

Frederick Eversley, Palm Springs: Palm Springs Art Museum, 1978

Frederick Eversley, Palm Springs: Palm Springs Art Museum, 1978

Frederick Eversley, Palm Springs: Palm Springs Art Museum, 1978

Frederick Eversley, Palm Springs: Palm Springs Art Museum, 1978

Frederick Eversley, Palm Springs: Palm Springs Art Museum, 1978

Frederick Eversley, Palm Springs: Palm Springs Art Museum, 1978

Frederick Eversley, Palm Springs: Palm Springs Art Museum, 1978

Frederick Eversley, Palm Springs: Palm Springs Art Museum, 1978

Frederick Eversley, Palm Springs: Palm Springs Art Museum, 1978

Frederick Eversley, Palm Springs: Palm Springs Art Museum, 1978

Frederick Eversley, Palm Springs: Palm Springs Art Museum, 1978

Frederick Eversley, Palm Springs: Palm Springs Art Museum, 1978

Frederick Eversley, Palm Springs: Palm Springs Art Museum, 1978

Frederick Eversley, Palm Springs: Palm Springs Art Museum, 1978

Frederick Eversley, Palm Springs: Palm Springs Art Museum, 1978

Frederick Eversley, Palm Springs: Palm Springs Art Museum, 1978

Mary Weatherford Selected Press The Art Show November 4 – 7, 2021

press@davidkordanskygallery.com www.davidkordanskygallery.com T: 323.935.3030 F: 323.935.3031

“Previews,” Frieze, October 2021, pp. 205-208

“Previews,” Frieze, October 2021, pp. 205-208

Durón, Maximilíano, “9 Sales Highlights from This Year’s Art Basel in Switzerland,” ARTNews.com, September 22, 2021

9 Sales Highlights from This Year’s Art Basel in Switzerland

By Maximilíano Durón | September 22, 2021 The world’s largest and most important art fair, Art Basel, opened earlier this week in the Swiss city, marking the marquee fair’s first in-person event in Europe since the start of the pandemic. Because of travel restrictions, fewer collectors from the United States and Asia made the journey to Europe, but that didn’t stop the world’s top galleries from making major sales. Below a look at some of what has sold at the fair so far.

Photo : Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio/Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

Mary Weatherford at David Kordansky Los Angeles–based David Kordansky Gallery had on offer two recent works by Mary Weatherford, both of which sold for $400,000 a piece. Made in the months following a series of solo shows at the Tang Teaching Museum in upstate New York, SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico, and the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, these works combine Weatherford’s signature abstract painting with neon lights to refer to “the environments, moods, and geological vicissitudes of Hawaii,” according to a release.

In an email, Kurt Mueller, a director at Kordansky, said, “As a gallery, we’ve been waiting to return to in-person fairs for nearly two years—the occasion at Basel was marked by incredible energy from attendees and numerous familiar faces.”

Brara, Noor, “Artists on Artists to Watch, and Maybe Even Collect,” NYTimes.com, June 14, 2021

Artists on Artists to Watch, and Maybe Even Collect We asked 16 established names to suggest a fellow talent they feel should be better known.

By Noor Brara | June 14, 2021 The best direction one could give to someone interested in expanding their knowledge of contemporary art is to pay attention to what artists are paying attention to; artists always know before everyone else does. With this in mind, we asked 16 established artists from all over the world about a young or underappreciated artist whose work resonates with them. They spoke about why these talents deserve more attention than they’re getting, and why readers should take time to explore their oeuvres, which inspect, among other things, issues of identity, race, material culture, social justice, climate change and how we live.

Mary Weatherford: Arnold J. Kemp, 53 Arnold J. Kemp is an incredible artist whose own work has been overlooked because of his incredible career as an educator. The last mention of him in the paper of record was from 2001 by Holland Cotter … so I see this as pure evidence that what I’m saying is the case, because it’s taken two decades for it to happen again. Kemp makes photography, sculpture and painting, and is also a poet and a performance artist. This particular sculpture, which is brandnew — the first thing I thought about when I saw it was [Jorge Luis] Borges, who is one of my favorite writers. Reading Borges is such a pleasure because I understand that there’s fiction masquerading as truth, and truth masquerading as fiction. And this particular sculpture comes closer to the mastery of Borges than any artwork I’ve ever encountered because of this novel that is stuffed in the pillows, which is indeed by an author named Arnold Joseph Kemp.

Arnold J. Kemp’s “Mr. Kemp: Yellowing, Drying, Scorching” (2020).Credit...Courtesy of the artist and Martos Gallery, New York. Photo by Tom Van Eynde And Arnold has been mistaken for the author Arnold Kemp. When looking at this chair, I’m wondering, because I know it’s an artwork: “Is this a real novel?

Is Arnold pretending that this novel exists? Does this novel exist?” Arnold J. Kemp is also a creator of fictions, and his work is so meta and brilliant. There’s a kind of cool delight I experience in walking around this sculpture in particular.

Travers, Andrew, “Strokes of Neon: Aspen Art Museum showcases Mary Weatherford’s ‘Neon Paintings’,” AspenTimes.com, February 4, 2021

Strokes of Neon: Aspen Art Museum showcases Mary Weatherford’s ‘Neon Paintings’

By Andrew Travers | February 4, 2021

With limited capacity in the Aspen Art Museum due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, and no splashy art opening, no artist talk, no big event crowds, visitors to the Aspen Art Museum have been able to spend intimate time with Mary Weatherford’s “Neon Paintings,” to get a little lost in or overwhelmed by these immersive works.

The exhibition includes Weatherford’s pivotal and breakout paintings, made since 2012, of dramatic abstract painted canvases affixed with glowing neon rods that both illuminate the painting and serve themselves as stand-out linear brushstrokes.

She made first such pieces in Bakersfield, inspired by the neon signage around the central California city. She first showed them there at the Todd Madigan Gallery at California State University at Bakersfield, where she was teaching.

When she first turned on the neon light on her original neon painting, with help from her students, Weatherford recalled in a December 2019 on the Installation view of Mary Weatherford, “Neon Paintings,” 2020. Credit Carter Seddon.

“Conversations About Art” podcast with former Aspen Art Museum director Heidi Zuckerman, she was simply relieved that the experiment didn’t fail.

“I was even surprised, I was shocked, because the woman at the neon shop in Bakersfield said, ‘So did that make the colors in the painting all muddy?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t know, I haven’t turned it on.’ She said, ‘Maybe it’s going to make it look muddy.’”

The stakes were high for Weatherford, who feared the lighting shopkeeper might be right.

“I was super gung ho about this idea. … I’d lie in bed and get these stomachaches like, ‘This is a terrible idea!’” she recalled, adding with a laugh: “And then I’d be relieved by the fact that it would be in Bakersfield and no one would see it.”

Of course, it did work and people did see it. Her “Neon Paintings” became Weatherford’s signature, though she had been a working artist since the 1980s, and became something of an art-collecting phenomenon with exhibitions in major galleries and museums.

When the David Kordansky Gallery, of Los Angeles, exhibited new Weatherford neon paintings at the Frieze Art Fair in 2015, T Magazine reported they “flew off their temporary walls within the first half-hour of (Oct. 15’s) V.I.P. preview.”

Weatherford was announced as the recipient of the 2020 Aspen Award for Art a year ago. The award was to include the customary August artist’s talk at the museum and honors at the annual ArtCrush gala, followed by a major solo exhibition. The pandemic scrapped the gatherings, of course, and any award ceremony. But the art show went on. It opened in December and will run through early May. The paintings are not purely abstract and do often carry secret narratives. Weatherford has said many were inspired by personal experiences and particular landscapes. They are precise moments in time, captured in abstract style but with as specific a subject as a photograph might capture.

Weatherford has specified some of them. Works included in the Aspen show include “Tempest,” from 2015, depicting a storm on the Pacific — a subject she has returned to often throughout her career — and “Chinatown,” with its moody nocturnal blues and warm oranges, depicting Manhattan’s Chinatown at night. “Blue Cut Fire,” with its violent movements of reds behind blue-green neon tubing, depicts the 2016 wildfire that tore through the San Gabriel Mountains.

Weatherford’s practice for these pieces carries on the abstract expressionist tradition of painting on the floor using a physically demanding process. She works barefoot, she said in the podcast, occasionally leaving a trace of stray footprint on her canvas and always leaving an undeniable residue of human exertion on the work.

‘The painting becomes the portal to all the other next paintings,” she said of her process. “Because I paint on the floor, I paint flat. And so when I see it stretched on the wall, it’s a completely different painting.”

Ross-Southall, Mika, “Melancholy in Black and Neon,” Hyperallergic.com, January 9, 2021

Melancholy in Black and Neon Mary Weatherford’s new paintings confront us with a sense of place, a remembered moment, a hidden story.

By Mika Ross-Southall | January 9, 2021

Installation view, Mary Weatherford: Train Yards at Gagosian, London (© Mary Weatherford. Photo: Lucy Dawkins. Courtesy Gagosian)

LONDON — In his memoir Speak, Memory (1951) Vladimir Nabokov writes about why trains are compelling and mournful.

Their long-drawn sigh when pulling into the station; the shadows and chinks of light that dance across carriages; the unsettling excitement of journeying into the unknown. The Californian artist Mary Weatherford tries to capture these qualities in her new series of 10 huge abstract paintings, Train Yards, on view at the Gagosian Gallery in London through February 27.

“There’s always something lonely and comforting about the sound of a train whistle,” she tells us in a 15-minute film on the gallery’s website that accompanies the exhibition. “Because you know somebody’s going somewhere. Somebody has a plan and somebody’s left someone and somebody’s going to meet someone. There’s a beginning and there’s going to be an ending and then there’s going to be another beginning.”

Created over the past four years, the paintings are based on the sounds and movements of trains and railway yards in the United States at night. Each contains a haunting, velvety morass of black emulsion brush-strokes — dynamic zig-zags, splatters, smudges, all pummeling the stretched linen, mimicking the rhythm of a train going over tracks. Most have one thin white neon strip-light drilled into their surface and connected by wires dropping to the floor like a luminous, three-dimensional line drawing atop the painted black background.

These works are powerful and riveting, partly thanks to their imposing scale. It’s about “trying to paint an experience,” Weatherford explains in the film, “and about being able to perceive colors at night …. They’re nocturnes. There are varying colors of darkness, and the [fluorescent] lights have the effect of moving towards you, going away from you. One might even be reminded of … bells and whistles and clanging.”

Ross-Southall, Mika, “Melancholy in Black and Neon,” Hyperallergic.com, January 9, 2021 “Bellows” (2016), in the first room, bursts with clouds of dark purple- and gray-tinged black paint framed by a stark white border. A short, vertical neon rod, its wire cords gently arching away from the painting, suggests the glow of a train in the distance. On the opposite wall, the swooshing black marks in “Nickel Plate Road” (2017-18) contain hints of purple and navy blue. A thicker patch of paint, which travels diagonally from the lower left corner to the center of the canvas, forms a path into a far-off horizon that disappears into pitch black; translucent vertical and horizontal lines above create a blur of buildings and trees passing by. Along the full length of the painting’s right edge is the cold, harsh white of a neon light — man-made rays from a train or station beaming across the landscape, perhaps.

Mary Weatherford, “Cosmos” (2020), flashe on linen, 112 x 99 inches (© Mary Weatherford. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio. Courtesy Gagosian)

American folk and blues music influenced the series, too; a lot of the painting’s titles come from song lyrics. “Country blues has so much about trains and traveling,” Weatherford says in the video, which includes a wistful blues soundtrack by Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth. Moore also performs a melancholic cover of “This Train Is Bound for Glory” (first recorded in 1922 and adapted by Woody Guthrie in 1958) in front of Weatherford’s work in the gallery, as well as a new acoustic composition inspired by one of her paintings — a beautifully hopeful melody that drifts over an unrelenting, rhythmic bass.

“There are times [in country blues] when people ride on top of trains to get to places … and the heavens are going by,” Weatherford adds. “There’s a combination of movement: of the train moving through space and the earth spinning, which makes it look like the stars are going across the sky.” In the second room we are met with six more works. Not all feature the neon lights. Instead, “Cosmos” (2020), for instance, radiates with bright flecks and swirls of white paint launching like rockets and stars from the hazy, ash background. Almost the entire canvas is covered in black in “Mars Light” (2019), but the paint glows with a clay-red pigment.

“Orion’s Belt” (2016) does include neon, here as an unyielding horizontal line that stretches across two bulbous black shapes and straps the canvas to the gallery’s wall.

It was 2012 when Weatherford first started using neon. A visiting artist at California State University in Bakersfield, she became entranced by the fluorescent signs — some half-illuminated or burnt out — of restaurants, shops, and old factories around the midsized city east of Los Angeles. The result was The Bakersfield Project, a series of seven large canvases swathed in muted colors and inscribed with a neon strip-light of sickly pink, green, blue, or red. She followed these with more paintings based on other cities, including Manhattan and LA. In “Coney Island II” (2012) four colorful neon rods (two white, one orange, one yellow) are set at jagged angles evoking the up-downup-down motion of a rollercoaster.

Although these neon paintings seem like a departure for Weatherford from her earlier abstract paintings, some of her work from the 1990s and 2000s incorporates natural found objects, such as starfish, sponges, and seashells, on plains of color that saturate the entire canvas.

What makes Train Yards stand out is the way it intensely and convincingly confronts us with a sense of place, a remembered moment, a hidden story that we’ve all experienced. “I’ve always wanted to make paintings about people’s lives,” Weatherford says in the film, and “the arc of history.” With this new show, those lives and histories are felt.

Installation view, Mary Weatherford: Train Yards at Gagosian, London (© Mary Weatherford. Photo: Lucy Dawkins.

Courtesy Gagosian)

Donoghue, Katy, “Mary Weatherford,” Whitewall, Winter 2020, pp. 88 - 93

Donoghue, Katy, “Mary Weatherford,” Whitewall, Winter 2020, pp. 88 - 93

Donoghue, Katy, “Mary Weatherford,” Whitewall, Winter 2020, pp. 88 - 93

Donoghue, Katy, “Mary Weatherford,” Whitewall, Winter 2020, pp. 88 - 93

Donoghue, Katy, “Mary Weatherford,” Whitewall, Winter 2020, pp. 88 - 93

Donoghue, Katy, “Mary Weatherford,” Whitewall, Winter 2020, pp. 88 - 93

Bruckner, Karen and Frances Anderton, “5 design things to do week of Nov 2 - 8,” KCRW.com, November 2, 2020

5 design things to do week of Nov 2 - 8

By Karen Bruckner & Frances Anderton | November 2, 2020

This week: Talk a virtual walk through fairy gardens by Takako Tajima; read poetry on ACE Hotel’s marquee; see housing solutions by the next generation of designers at AIA/LA’s 2 x 8 DOMUM; meet the ghosts of Bunker Hill at a book launch for author Nathan Marsak, with Frances Anderton; see Mary Weatherford’s ‘The Japan Drawings’ at David Kordansky gallery.

Mary Weatherford, In the cedar forest, 2019, shellac ink on Gampi Torinoko paper. Coutresy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

Mary Weatherford: The Japan Drawings David Kordansky Gallery welcomes Los Angeles based artist Mary Weatherford to their new exhibtion space, designed by the multidisciplinary architecture and design practice wHY. The exhibition, ‘The Japan Drawings’ brings together four groups of works - all shellac ink paintings on Gampi Torinoko paper - that Weatherford produced during a 2019 residency at Troedsson Villa in Nikko, Japan. The residency, founded by artist Anne Eastman in 2015, offers immersion in a setting of ancient and modern architecture (including shrines and temples) within a forest landscape. Weatherford’s new drawings reflect this environment in a range of compositional approaches, color palettes, and textures. Read more about the artist and the exhibition here.

When: Opens Nov 7; exhibition runs through Dec 17. By appointment only.

Where: David Kordansky Gallery, 5130 W Edgewood Pl, Los Angeles 90019 Tickets: Free, but reservations required. You can make an appointment by calling 323.935.3030.

Greenberger, Alex, “Mary Weatherford Revisits a 1957 ARTnews Profile of Painter Joan Mitchell,” ARTnews.com, September 4, 2020

Mary Weatherford Revisits a 1957 ARTnews Profile of Painter Joan Mitchell

By Alex Greenberger | September 4, 2020

©ARTNEWS

In 1957, art critic Irving Sandler paid a visit to the studio of painter Joan Mitchell, an Abstract Expressionist known for her brushy images capturing nature. The result of that visit, printed in the October 1957 issue of ARTnews, became one of the most famous essays in this magazine’s “Paints a Picture” series, in which an artist illuminates the process behind one of his or her artworks. With an upcoming traveling retrospective of Mitchell’s work at the Baltimore Museum of Art in mind, ARTnews enlisted Mary Weatherford, an artist who has spoken of being inspired by Mitchell, to discuss Sandler’s article. “He’s a beautiful writer, so clear, so easy to read,” Weatherford said of Sandler’s writing. “I want to be the equivalent when I’m talking about this.” ___ Irving Sandler on Joan Mitchell: She finds particularly distasteful moral insinuations concerning “good” versus “bad” criteria, and insists that “there is no one way to paint;

there is no single answer.” Miss Mitchell is reticent to talk about painting, so in order to approach the underlying processes in her work, the Socratic method was needed, rejecting some classifications, modifying or keeping others.

Mary Weatherford on Irving Sandler: He basically tells us at the very beginning that for this article he just ekes things out of her by asking lots of questions. I like that…. Sometimes, writing about art gets swayed toward the artists, but really, it’s always two artists—a collaboration, in a way. I can tell how hard Irving Sandler worked to try to get it right, to try to get down in the English language what Mitchell thought about her own work.

Unlike some of the younger artists who have reacted away from the elders of Abstract-Expressionism, she sees herself as a “conservative,” although her pictures can hardly be described as hidebound. She not only appreciates the early struggles of the older painters, whose efforts expedited acceptance for those following them, but finds a number of qualities in their work that have a profound meaning for her.

Here’s the great thing about Sandler’s writing: I don’t notice much. A sentence goes down easy. His writing doesn’t have any barbs on it. He’s such a beautiful writer.

In the case of Bridge, she hesitated and decided to save this canvas for future study. The picture was rejected because the feeling was not specific enough, and because the painting was not “accurate.” To her, accuracy involves a clear image produced in the translation of the substance of nature into the nature of memory.

She starts a picture called Bridge for the article and then abandons it. Then she starts this other painting about her standard poodle [George Swimming at Barnes Hole]. I have a friend who, when he was a graduate student, interviewed Mitchell over a long period of time and asked her about that painting. He asked her if it got too cold for the dog to swim, and she said to him, “No, Paul, the painting got cold.” That’s almost what Sandler is describing—that kind of process where she starts out with a good memory on a sunny day, and then the painting gets cold.

She liked George, but felt that it still lacked a certain structure and an “accuracy in intensity.” When asked about her personal meanings in this work and their communication, she answered: “If a painting comes from them, then they don’t matter. Other people don’t have to see what I do in my work.”

He’s describing someone like a tennis player. You have to know what you’re doing while you’re making decisions. Your body has to be so trained that you can command it to make whatever decision your mind is thinking.

Urist, Jacoba, “Take A Virtual Trip to Mary Weatherford’s Studio,” CulturedMag.com, June 23, 2020

TAKE A VIRTUAL TRIP TO MARY WEATHERFORD’S STUDIO

By Jacoba Urist | June 23, 2020

MARY WEATHERFORD. PHOTO BY ANTONY HOFFMAN; COURTESY OF GAGOSIAN.

Known for sublime color and light paintings, Mary Weatherford creates expressive canvases that capture a visceral sense of place. Over the last decade, her work has also become synonymous with a signature technique: using neon to push the bounds of abstraction. An important departure from her massive colorscapes, “The Train Yards”—originally slated to open at Gagosian in June, pre-COVID, and now tentatively rescheduled for fall—is a collection of entirely black paintings. Made over the last four years, they translate the night view and sounds of a train yard as they evoke the grand mythology of railway travel. To wit, the painter has compiled an accompanying Spotify playlist of the same title, to celebrate the tradition of the locomotive in American music. Weatherford’s process is heavily research-based.

Deeply moved by the history of the transcontinental railway, the artist shares how its dark legacy also influenced this body of work. We met for a virtual studio visit, in which she greeted me with a huge, entirely blank wall calendar in the background—the perfect iteration of the moment.

What has the COVID-19 shutdown and the last three months been like for you?

I flew to South Africa in early March with the intention of making a journey northward up the continent. I’d never been to Africa and I’d just finished all my “Train Yards” paintings. My plan was to make a slow trip over two and a half months, gradually traveling north from South Africa to Zimbabwe, and up, up, up ending in Morocco. From there, I would fly to London for the opening of “The Train Yards” at Gagosian, scheduled for the first week of June. These are serious paintings, and I was pleased with the time slot—Francis Bacon’s exhibition “Couplings” was Gagosian’s London show last summer. I thought there would be a good connection between Bacon’s work, which has tremendous gravitas, and this work.

Had you planned on painting in Africa?

When I was in Japan last fall, I worked the entire time and felt that I missed out on a lot of experiences because I was working. This journey was intended simply to see and experience places. I’m not the kind of artist who always needs to be making something, though I know there are artists who do. I paint from memory. Africa was to be a trip where I could experience things without bringing my paints along. It’s a lot of work to take all the supplies. It’s a big kit. Maybe I would make sketches, but nothing I would exhibit.

What was South Africa like during COVID? When I arrived in Cape Town, there was maybe one case in the country. But, coming off the plane, they still took our temperatures and had signs about the virus and washing hands everywhere. I got there on a Saturday and by the second Monday, the president, Cyril Ramaphosa, went on television and made an extraordinary speech about how he was going to completely lock down the country. It was the most serious lockdown in the world outside of Wuhan. No planes in; no planes out.

We relocated to Hermanus, a summer vacation spot known for whale watching. The beach house was fine for a few weeks but then the weather turned. I flipped on the heat and it didn’t work. So from there, we moved to a small farmhouse in a nearby valley at the edge of a vineyard. It was a working farm; we had cattle and chickens and a baboon troupe and could walk around outside on the property. People weren’t allowed to exercise outside in public in South Africa or even walk their dog on the sidewalk. You could only leave your house for the store or the pharmacy. The government made it illegal to post falsities about the virus. There was a guy who posted some falsity on Facebook and they went to his house and arrested him.

We started a project making masks with a local woman and her mother. We donated masks to the hospital and the police department.

After 35 days in lockdown, we received an email from the Canadian High Commission through the United States Embassy, informing us that the Canadians were organizing a flight from Cape Town to London, and then we could get a direct one to Los Angeles.

What are your thoughts as Los Angeles begins to reopen?

Today I saw that the governor, Gavin Newsom, said that everybody is required to wear a mask in public. I’m frustrated with the belligerent ignorance with which people go outside without a mask. It’s defiance in a way that’s unnecessary.

You’ve been working on the “Train Yards”series since 2016. It feels like an eternity has passed in that time.

Much has happened in four years. I started these paintings before the current presidency and administration. They’re intense pieces that I was working on for myself, in between other projects. I wanted to make an exhibition that was a room full of black paintings with white light

Urist, Jacoba, “Take A Virtual Trip to Mary Weatherford’s Studio,” CulturedMag.com, June 23, 2020

that would conjure the feeling of a train yard at night, locomotives and various trains coming and going—the atmosphere, the sounds, the smells, the temperature. “Train Yards” was something I would come back to between other exhibitions. My work is often about the history of the United States. For this series, I researched the history of the laying of the transcontinental railroad. The more I read, I learned that it was mostly built during the Civil War. I was driving here to speak with you, and I thought, “When was the first time that I thought about trains as a child?” Do you remember the jump rope song for Double Dutch, where it says, “Meet me at the station, be on time”? You would have to jump into the Double Dutch right at the time. One girl jumps in after the other. I made a playlist on Spotify to accompany “Train Yards.” It’s twenty tracks— country blues, folk music; Mississippi John Hurt, Woody Guthrie; all of the songs have the image of the train. Once you start looking at traditional American music, you see the train is used to convey love, coming and going, travel, freedom, being on the road. The first track is Odetta’s “900 Miles.” People may be unfamiliar with her, but she’s a great American folk singer. The last song is the Joan Baez version of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” by Robbie Robertson.

MARY WEATHERFORD, NO. 4000, 2017–18. FLASHE AND NEON ON LINEN | 112 X 99 IN | 284.5 X 251.5 CM © MARY WEATHERFORD, PHOTO BY FREDRIK NILSEN; COURTESY OF GAGOSIAN.

Hearing this playlist, I pictured you painting to it in the studio.

Oh no. These are two entirely different things. That’s a question I get often: do you listen to music while you’re working? I can listen to music up until the point where the painting gets difficult. I think my senses are hypersensitive, so I can’t smell and hear at the same time, or look and smell, or look and hear. If I’m looking at a color and there’s music—I can’t, it’s too much to process. I might listen to music or a podcast while mixing colors, but even then, it sometimes becomes such a difficult task that I have to turn the music off.

What is the narrative in these abstract paintings?

That takes a bit of art history to answer. What is an abstract painting? What is a pure abstraction? Think about Malevich or Albers. I was about to say Alma Thomas. She’s on my mind because of that photograph of the Obamas at their White House seder with Alma Thomas’s Resurrection (1966) on the wall in the family dining room. I think Ad Reinhardt is an abstract painter, but Alma Thomas is conjuring something for us—dappled light. So you’re asking me, what is the narrative in your abstract paintings, and my answer is: I’m not sure I make abstract paintings. In the late ’80’s and ’90’s, the concentric circle paintings I made were circular timelines and they could be considered abstract, meaning that they don’t point to anything outside of themselves.

Take Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43), which I would argue is a painting of Boogie Woogie. When you look at the work, you experience the rhythm of the music. In my series, the painting Heaven Going By (2020) looks like the Milky Way, the stars in the sky.

It has no neon in it. It’s a dark night. But it also looks like when headlights shine on falling snow. So, it’s a representation of several things.

Is it an abstract painting? Are these train yards that have been abstracted? I try to create works that reproduce an experience. I really made them to imagine myself being in a certain place.

How did your historical research impact your process?

In a way, these works allude to stories. The building of the US railroad lays out a history of enslavement, immigration, racism and Manifest Destiny. There’s one painting called Across the Plains (2019) that imagines a night sky on the great plains. There, the railroad brought the bison to near extinction, moved in settlers and drove the native Plains tribes from their land. It was essentially war without war.

Southern railroad lines before the Civil War were built by enslaved people. The Central Pacific line that came up from Sacramento through the High Sierras was built almost entirely by Chinese immigrants, at a great human toll. The history of their contribution is just now being written about by Stanford professor Gordon Chang, in his 2019 book Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad. Unbelievably, there’s no personal record by a Chinese immigrant who worked on the railroad. There was a tunnel that took years to dig and blast through, during which Chinese immigrant workers lived in the tunnel. In 1867, there was a famous strike in which the owners of the railroad cut off the food supply and starved thousands of immigrant laborers into breaking the strike. They still never got equal pay compared to other workers.

This exhibition is about many things: freedom and travel, as well as the dark side of history. But the works aren’t specific illustrations; I’m trying to paint mystery.

Westfall, Stephen, “Beyond Neon: Mary Weatherford’s abstraction is rooted in a sense of place,” ARTnews.com, Art in America, April 15, 2020

BEYOND NEON: MARY WEATHERFORD’S ABSTRACTION IS ROOTED IN A SENSE OF PLACE

By Stephen Westfall | April 15, 2020

View of Mary Weatherford’s exhibition “Canyon–Daisy–Eden,” 2020, showing (foreground) lovely day, 2015, Flashe and neon on linen; at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery.

In 2012, Mary Weatherford was invited by the artist Joey Kötting, gallery director at California State University, Bakersfield, to make a series of paintings in response to the area’s high desert landscape, local history, and light. Driving around during her five-week stint, Weatherford was entranced by the glow of neon signs in town and at roadside stands beyond the city’s borders. Seeing the signs set against the Bakersfield sky at twilight catalyzed something for her. She found a local neon shop to fabricate ever-so-slightly bent tubes that she then affixed to large canvases bearing broad-stroked, fluid grounds. She chose each color—ruby, lemon yellow, light green, etc.—for its effect on the background pigments and left the cords and connecting boxes fully visible in front of the canvases as a form of “drawing.” Before long, these breathtaking composite paintings, with their echoes of such predecessors as Keith Sonnier and Bruce Nauman, boosted her already significant career as a canny post-Pop, postPictures Generation feminist painter. She has exhibited at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles; participated in MoMA’s 2014 survey “Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World”; and mounted an acclaimed 2018 exhibition at the cavernous Gagosian space on 24th Street in New York.

Westfall, Stephen, “Beyond Neon: Mary Weatherford’s abstraction is rooted in a sense of place,” ARTnews.com, Art in America, April 15, 2020

Mary Weatherford: Violetta, 1991, acrylic, Flashe, and silkscreen ink on canvas, 39 by 72 inches. PRIVATE COLLECTION.

Currently, Weatherford is the subject of a tight but well-selected thirty-year traveling retrospective. “Canyon-Daisy-Eden” can be seen at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College through July 12 and will travel to SITE Santa Fe in October. The show makes clear that the neon paintings, for which she is best known, relate not only to the sense of place that emerged in her work after she moved back to California from New York in 1999, but also to the collaged and silkscreened canvases that she began in the late 1980s.

Weatherford, who was born in Ojai, California, in 1963, grew up in San Diego as the daughter of an Episcopalian priest and a historian. She left California for Princeton, which offers art classes but not an art major. There she painted and studied architecture, while serving as an assistant to Sam Hunter, a foundational historian of postwar American art, especially Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. Weatherford probably discerned in both those movements formal reminders of the mountains, cliffs, beaches, and impossibly deep and variant Pacific horizons along the California coast. Pollock, Newman, Rothko, Frankenthaler, Louis, and Noland offered an evolving conception of what Big Painting could do, from distribution of incident to saturation of color.

In a different though related vein, she attended a Rosalind Krauss lecture based on the scholar’s influential essay “The Originality of the AvantGarde,” which examines the paradoxical relationship of “original” artists like Rodin to formal repetition, copies, and editions. Sherrie Levine’s 1981 photographs of reproductions of Walker Evans photographs raised questions about male control of “authorship” and how a woman might enter the conversation. In 1984–85, after Princeton, Weatherford attended the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Immersed in an environment emphasizing semiotics, critical theory, and appropriation, she was challenged to absorb such principles yet paint beyond their parameters.

AMONG THE FIRST Weatherford paintings to garner attention were her large target paintings of 1989, two of which hang at the entrance to the Tang exhibition. Both titled Nagasaki, the canvases are each 82 inches square with extra-deep stretcher bars that evoke the iconic objecthood of the early stripe and Protractor paintings of her famous Princeton precursor, Frank Stella. The circular bands, echoing the iconographic impact of compositions by Jasper Johns and Kenneth Noland, have the flatness of Stella’s early handling, but without the border of exposed canvas between each plane of color. The hues themselves are more atmospheric: an orange bisque filling the corners of one painting, a pinkish field embracing baked beige circles set flush to brick-red ones in the other. These colors are derived from a kimono given to the artist by a former boyfriend, but there’s a shared light in them reminiscent of west-facing stucco houses just after the sun has gone down, a Southern California light that whispers of Romanticism despite Weatherford’s Minimalist and Neo-Geo appropriations. And then there’s the shared title: “Nagasaki” referring to Puccini’s posthumous Madame Butterfly and the suffering, doomed Cio-Cio San, even as it also resonates with the historically ominous titles of some of Stella’s Black paintings (e.g., Arbeit Macht Frei, 1967). One can hardly miss the point of associating a bull’s-eye with an atomic-bombed Japanese city. Not in the show is another 1989 painting, titled (using an alternative Anglicized spelling) Cho-Cho-San. Here a silkscreened peony blooms against its darker leaves, an ectoplasmic-toned white against a black-green ground. An early example of Weatherford’s extended exploration of silkscreen and collage, the work nods to yet one more postwar male artist—Andy Warhol, who hid his Romanticism behind the apparent emotional cool of Pop appropriations.

Weatherford began silkscreening onto canvas in 1988, and, though the target paintings intervened, she continued for nearly a decade to employ this transfer method as a primary means for fixing an image. There are, in fact, multiple Cho-Cho-San ink-and-oil works (from both 1989 and 1990), as

Westfall, Stephen, “Beyond Neon: Mary Weatherford’s abstraction is rooted in a sense of place,” ARTnews.com, Art in America, April 15, 2020

there are multiple Nagasakis. In the Cho-Cho-San works, the concentric circles of the target are reduced to thin lines dissolving in an amniotic pool of transparent darkness, releasing the flower into light like the answer floating upward in a Magic 8 Ball. In the Tang survey, Third Riddle (1991), a large (almost 9-foot-high) vertical painting whose title alludes to the suitors’ test in Turandot, performs much like Cho-Cho-San. A silkscreened chrysanthemum blooms about three quarters of the way to the top and a bit to the right out of a violet-black stain split by a spear of light. The shadow that crosses the white gleam and fills up the space between the petals renders the flower seemingly three dimensional. In the deep seep of the dark violet stain set against the subtle detonation of the flower, we see the mastery of composition that Weatherford brings to her paintings from the outset. In the opera, the answer to the third riddle is “love,” which augurs the cold-hearted princess Turandot’s ultimate surrender to marriage. The luminosity of the blossom in the painting is perfectly matched to the moment of emotional illumination in the opera.

The distraught yet resiliently defiant female psyche is poetically figured throughout the silkscreened paintings. According to curator-critic Bill Arning, the near or outright mythic stature of beset female protagonists in ballet and opera referenced by Weatherford are often projections of the artist herself, so the “her” of Her Insomnia (1991) and Her Clairvoyance (1993) is the artist1. Insomnia was long related to the “woman’s affliction” called hysteria, and thus to the debilitative foresight of Cassandra and Ophelia. Her Insomnia distributes red thorny rose stems on a near-black ground, while Her Clairvoyance shows eels writhing on a rocky ultraviolet sea bed.

A nocturnal palette runs through those paintings, but not all of Weatherford’s operatic images are so deeply shadowed. In 5:00 a.m.

(1992), thorny pale-green stems establish a vertical band against the washed-out violet-pink field, at roughly the golden section division of the six-by-ten-foot horizontal canvas. Even fewer shadows Mary Weatherford: Night and Day, 1996, oil and silkscreen on jute, 90 by 63 inches. appear in Violetta (1991), whose flowers star an expanse of fluoPRIVATE COLLECTION. rescently virulent olive chartreuse. The flowers seem to flutter like moths and, sure enough, by 1994 Weatherford was collaging images of butterflies and moths, along with the actual shells of sea snails and starfish, onto her paintings’ surfaces. Bearing a number of these smaller works, the “salon wall” in the Tang installation is itself a kind of bricolage installation.

BY 1995, WEATHERFORD introduced figurative elements to her paintings—in some cases, a silhouette of her beloved younger sister Margaret’s head; in others, an image of herself bent double and clutching her head as if in grief, while her long hair spills over her hands like water. In hindsight, it is an almost unspeakable irony that Weatherford’s anguished pose foreshadows Margaret’s death from cancer in 2012, the same year that the artist made her formal breakthrough in Bakersfield. Margaret’s silhouette is a centered vertical protuberance in several paintings, rising from the bottom of the canvas into the pictorial field and rounding into human shape in a way that can also recall a pool or a geological formation. There’s a whimsical effect to these portraits, since the expressive features of Margaret’s face are usually obscured in favor of a plane of paint, much like the thick pours that constitute the primary figure-ground relationship in a number of the smaller moth and seashell paintings on the salon wall. Through this combination of bricolage and body-centric painterliness, Weatherford transitions from the formal restraint (even at Big Painting scale) of the Neo Geo and Pictures aesthetics that she emerged from into a much freer painting space. She hasn’t given up photo silkscreen or printing yet, but the rest of the painting surface is no longer suppressed to accommodate the transferred image. Rather, the transferred image sits like a stick-on element over other surface layers.

In the seven-and-a-half-foot-high Night and Day (1996), Weatherford’s kneeling, hair-clutching image, almost life-size, rests in the lower center of a blue-black ground. Above, the remainder of the field is filled by a pale pink half-orb, with a much smaller white disk inside it. The deep yellow and dark orange silkscreen shape of Weatherford’s body is bolstered—made an almost tangible presence—by the addition of paint. The artist was using jute instead of canvas at this point, and the material’s coarser texture meant that heavier-bodied paint was needed to hold flat color, while looser and thinner washes would pool irregularly in the exaggerated pockets between warp and weft, where the priming coat had settled. The work’s vinyl

Westfall, Stephen, “Beyond Neon: Mary Weatherford’s abstraction is rooted in a sense of place,” ARTnews.com, Art in America, April 15, 2020

Mary Weatherford: absorbent, 2000, Flashe and sponges on canvas, 66 by 82 inches. COLLECTION THE ARTIST.

Flashe paint manages these transitions with remarkable vividness, drying matte while maintaining a bracing chromatic intensity. The grief in the self-image is lightened by the figure’s weightlessness in the painting’s (outer) space and by the sensuality of the brush gestures filling each shape and ground. Other iconic self-portraits and portraits come to mind: Courbet’s youthful Le Désespéré (The Desperate Man), 1843–45, with its bugeyed expression; and Harry Callahan’s photograph Eleanor, Chicago (1949), showing his wife crowned with ropy, wet hair as she stands neck-deep in water. Weatherford is amused enough by the lugubriousness of her own head-in-hands image to title one painting Any Cat Stevens Song (1996), suggesting that the soundtracks of our lives are attuned to our heartbreak as much as to our bliss.

Weatherford’s expressive paint handling opened up further when she moved back to California in 1999. That was also when her paintings started responding formally to her natural environment. She generated visual tone poems of the coast, stacking shapes and bands of color into drastically simplified images of sand, sea, sky, and sun. In beach (2000), a five-foot-high painting, the order goes from bottom to top: dark head silhouette (touching the bottom edge), yellow sand, curving blue sea/sky, huge orange-pink cloud. It’s an order not unlike that of Night and Day, but in spite of the wavering edges of each border, the horizon line situates us in a landscape rather than the semiotic outer space of the earlier painting. Some of the Margaret heads from 1996 also situate us in a “scape” of some kind. We are looking in the same direction as she is, from behind her. But there is little or no spatial orientation in the allover chromatic weather that surrounds her.

Around this same time, Weatherford began affixing sponges to her paintings. An obvious nod to Yves Klein’s “Sponge Reliefs” (1959–61), these sponge works are conceptually mutable, evoking the sea, heads, stones, and even potatoes. The clumpy invertebrates are appropriative, sure, but they serve a distinct aesthetic purpose. As the title of absorbent (2000) implies, the sponges soak up color and push it into real space, much as the silkscreened chrysanthemum in the trompe l’oeil Third Riddle promises to do.

The sponge paintings represent the apogee of Weatherford’s bricolage practice before she began the neon paintings. Yet she continued to attach starfish and shells here and there, as she delved further into painterly mark-making to create a kind of caricature. Cartoonish essentialism runs through her sunsets, moonrises over brick walls (LA is a city of alleyways), and—in a couple of cases featuring compressed Franz Kline brushstrokes— quick, hilariously accurate portraits of a black cat that haunted her backyard. The eyes are tiny iridescent seashells with a black stroke for the pupil.

This first half-decade back in California, spent stretching out with paint, seems to have prepared her to make the leap into a loose, tactilely rich painting from observation. That shift meant an increase in surface incident, achieved by layering washes in a way that leaves the color underneath showing through—the ton sur ton of Bonnard updated via the epic stain painting of Frankenthaler and Louis.

In 2004 Weatherford started painting the light and shadow of the day through a huge thicket of vines that had overtaken a trellis in her front yard.

The Tang exhibition includes the ivy mesh (2004) on the salon wall. It’s a small horizontal painting with gray-green vines and leaves emerging into foreground light and disappearing into black shadow. As these works expanded somewhat in scale, the dark background began to serve as a volumetric midway passage, yielding to light behind the thicket. Flickers of light flutter around the shadowed space like moths, a Corot effect pushed

Westfall, Stephen, “Beyond Neon: Mary Weatherford’s abstraction is rooted in a sense of place,” ARTnews.com, Art in America, April 15, 2020

to the level of Charles Burchfield’s The Coming of Spring (1917–43), in which every tree, hillock, and flower seems to have an individual soul. The vine paintings never reached large scale, which suits their scrutiny-inviting intimacy. It’s a shame space wouldn’t allow more of these paintings in the show, as I find the whole series to be among the finest, gnarliest, and most specific paintings of vegetation in the last half-century.

OVERLAPPING THE TIMELINE of the Vine works is an extended series of paintings Weatherford made of rocks at Malibu’s Point Dume—two examples are at the Tang—and a subsequent series depicting a cave she found up the California coast in Pismo Beach. Only one of the Cave paintings is included in the exhibition, the labia-walled Georgia (2010), executed in multiple shades of blue, with a slyly clitoral starfish almost invisible at the top of the indigo cave-void. It’s an open letter to Georgia O’Keeffe with the starfish also recalling the stars in works by German-American Symbolist painter Agnes Pelton (1881–1961).² Weatherford would make plein air studies on paper at the sites and work on larger canvases in the studio.

Treating the textures of rock as a Monet-like record of shifts in chromatic light, and rendering the contrast of glare and shadow in fluid and fast-drying paint, Weatherford became fluent in the polychromatic “action” techniques of staining and sponging.

These were the basis for the blots and swipes that dance with the electrified tubes in the neon paintings.

Mary Weatherford: Ruby I (Thriftimart), 2012, Flashe and neon on linen, 93 by 79 inches.

HAMMER MUSEUM, LOS ANGELES.

The rock and cave works also have their antecedents in nineteenth-century French painting, notably Monet’s views of the natural bridge at Étretat on the Normandy Coast, Courbet’s sinewy cave paintings (he also made paintings of Étretat), and Degas’s landscape monotypes, some of which are nearly abstract.

This deep history brings us to Weatherford’s engagement with Frankenthaler, herself a Francophile. Like her predecessor, Weatherford makes her large works on the floor, so she’s actually in the field of the painting.

Of the three neon paintings at the Tang, Ruby I (Thriftimart), 2012, most evidently springs from the cave paintings. As in many of those works, a border surrounds the central build-up of red, blue, black, and black-violet washes that suggest a monadic void. Vertically traversing the center but bending slightly to the right toward the bottom is a tube of ruby neon, staining the dark pool of paint with its glow. To the left, a white cord drapes down to a transformer box on the floor. Nothing is concealed. And, as always with Weatherford, much is going on.

Discussing From the Mountain to the Sea (2014), the first of her paintings in which two neon tubes of different colors merge into one continuous line, the artist offered a peek into her crowded mind: “I have [Lucio] Fontana in my head. I have Mario Merz and Barry Le Va. Of course the cords are borrowed from Eva Hesse. It’s sort of a rotating card catalog going on up here [taps head].” Later in the same interview, she said: “I’m not painting a painting that’s finished and then putting neon on it. I’m painting with the expectation this element will be added.”³ Weatherford’s neon paintings have expanded into scapes that encompass treks up arroyos and allude to political violence. She regards the neon as something like a cut but also a lingering, compositional light4. The works reflect the influence of a chorus of predecessors, but they are always definitively shaped by her own mind, her own sorrows and exhilarations, her insomnia and clairvoyance. The glimpse of the city lights from the top of the canyon is her own song.

1 Bill Arning, “Weatherford’s Women,” in the forthcoming catalogue for the Tang exhibition. The volume will also include essays and poetry by artists Rebecca Morris and Arnold Kemp; an article by Elissa Auther, deputy director and chief curator of the Museum of Art and Design, New York; an interview with Tang director Ian Berry; and “East of the 5, South of the 10,” a story by Margaret Weatherford, the artist’s sister, who brilliantly imagines the LA area as a noir Olympus for the fallible Greek gods.

2 Works by this recently rediscovered artist are currently on display in “Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, through June 28.

3 Mary Weatherford, “from the Mountain to the Sea: A CONVERSATION,” in Robert Faggen, Mary Weatherford: The Neon Paintings, Claremont, Calif., Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, Claremont McKenna College, and Munich, London, New York, DelMonico Books, Prestel Verlag, 2016, pp. 203–04.

4 Ibid., p. 202.

Wei, Lilly, “Mary Weatherford: Canyon–Daisy–Eden,” StudioInternational.com, March 9, 2020

Mary Weatherford: Canyon–Daisy–Eden This first survey show for the artist features work from 1989 to 2015 and reveals the experimental nature of her use of scale, colour and materials.

Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York. 1 February – 12 July 2020

By Lilly Wei | March 9, 2020

Mary Weatherford: Canyon–Daisy–Eden, installation view, Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, 2020. Photo: Arthur Evans.

Mary Weatherford: Canyon-Daisy-Eden seems to be an exhibition full of conundrums and oppositions. On the one hand, the paintings seem bold, even confrontational; on the other, there is a certain reserve, elusiveness and ambiguity. Ranging from abstract to representational, the silken to the roughedup, their imagery hints at secrets, their surfaces strewn with private symbols and encoded visual language, clues to more biographical readings. Titles and text matter, although they, too, are enigmatic. Canyon-Daisy-Eden, Weatherford explains, are the names of paintings and, together, they form a brief poem. But I suspect that Weatherford is an unreliable narrator, deliberately so, and that the mingling of the fictive and the real constitutes a great part of her work’s pleasures, of its uncanniness and resistance to revelation at the same time as it reveals.

Opposition also applies to scale. The paintings’ assertiveness is due partly to their size. Several here are three metres (10 feet) across, and she can go much further. Weatherford has said that she has always been comfortable working large. But then she might zoom down to formats a couple of handspans in measurement. More than two dozen of such (mostly) smaller works are installed together salon-style, functioning like a lexicon of her practice.

Or she might detail, placing objects such as sponges on the painted surface, just so, or tiny shells and the minuscule starfish that abound, say, in the immersive, blue-washed vertical, 10.26 (1998), which Weatherford uses as an emblem of self-regeneration and healing, of recurrence. She elides sea and sky, water and air in this ethereal, levitating painting, and the starfish become stars, myth.

This is Weatherford’s first survey exhibition. Co-curated by the Houston-based Bill Arning and Ian Berry, the director of the Tang, it is on view at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs until 12 July, and features work from 1989 to 2015. The earliest are a pair of handsome target paintings and part of a series based on opera and ballet heroines, their geometry accompanied by a story. The canvases, alternating broad rings of slightly raised yellow and maroon on a monochromatic ground are a nod to Jasper Johns and Cady Noland, although not intentionally, Weatherford says. But provocatively titled Nagasaki, the targets also conjure the city destroyed by the dropping of the second atomic bomb three days after Hiroshima as well as the setting for Puccini’s Madam Butterfly. In addition, the circles suggest tree rings, or “circular time,” as Arning describes

Wei, Lilly, “Mary Weatherford: Canyon–Daisy–Eden,” StudioInternational.com, March 9, 2020

Mary Weatherford. Georgia, 2010. Flashe and starfish on linen, 44 x 50 in. Private collection. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio.

it, the peg on which the overall installation is hung, and not on a chronological order. The works, Berry adds, are visible from several vantage points within the divisions of the gallery to encourage a sense of continuity that is not strictly linear in sequence.

From the Cave Painting series, there is Big Red Margaret Head (1997). It’s the first and portrays what seems to be a solitary giant head. Occupying nearly a third of the picture plane, wrapped in a red scarf (we might think burqa today), it seems to look into the beckoning, seductive blackness of the ground. It is named for her sister and pinned with a starfish, its poignancy all the more powerful since the feeling it emanates is mercurial, as it reverberates between intimations of mortality and immortality, of agency and fate.

Another from the series is Georgia (2010), in shades of blue, black, white and grey, named for O’Keeffe, in which the central space of what suggests a grotto is both a void and opaque, sheltering and yet ominous. It reminds us that grotto is a corruption of crypt and also the root for grotesque, grotesquerie, linked to the irregularity of forms that characterise the baroque and rococo.

But it is the three works from the series begun in 2012, the Bakersfield Project (shown at Gagosian Chelsea in 2018), that are the highlights of the show.

Inspired by the bright illuminated signage of the city, Ruby 1 (Thriftimart) (2012), Canyon (2014) and Lovely Day (2015) are made of marble dust stirred into white gesso for subtle shimmer and Flashe, a signature medium, which Weatherford loves for its malleability, richness and range of colours.

The paint is sponged, smeared, poured, wiped, going from gossamer to matte, the colours strung across the spectrum, mutating from diaphanous to plush to dense patches of paint to bare support, in conversation with Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell, among others. To these surfaces, slender neon-filled glass rods, which are made to order, and their dangling cords are added, like three-dimensional line drawings hovering in space, emitting sizzling, quicksilver streaks of luminosity, the urban intersecting with nature, her own lightning fields. They also made me think how site-specific Weatherford’s work is, how steeped in romanticism, there at the edge of the continent where American dreams begin and end.

Walker, Hamza, “Mary Weatherford,” BOMB, Summer 2019, pp. cover, 33-43

Walker, Hamza, “Mary Weatherford,” BOMB, Summer 2019, pp. cover, 33-43

Walker, Hamza, “Mary Weatherford,” BOMB, Summer 2019, pp. cover, 33-43

Walker, Hamza, “Mary Weatherford,” BOMB, Summer 2019, pp. cover, 33-43

Walker, Hamza, “Mary Weatherford,” BOMB, Summer 2019, pp. cover, 33-43

Walker, Hamza, “Mary Weatherford,” BOMB, Summer 2019, pp. cover, 33-43

Walker, Hamza, “Mary Weatherford,” BOMB, Summer 2019, pp. cover, 33-43

Walker, Hamza, “Mary Weatherford,” BOMB, Summer 2019, pp. cover, 33-43

Walker, Hamza, “Mary Weatherford,” BOMB, Summer 2019, pp. cover, 33-43

Walker, Hamza, “Mary Weatherford,” BOMB, Summer 2019, pp. cover, 33-43

Walker, Hamza, “Mary Weatherford,” BOMB, Summer 2019, pp. cover, 33-43

Walker, Hamza, “Mary Weatherford,” BOMB, Summer 2019, pp. cover, 33-43

“Museum Previews: Mary Weatherford,” Art in America, August 2019, p. 41

Peterson, Jennifer, “Mary Weatherford,” Gagosian, Fall 2018, pp. 60-68

Peterson, Jennifer, “Mary Weatherford,” Gagosian, Fall 2018, pp. 60-68

Peterson, Jennifer, “Mary Weatherford,” Gagosian, Fall 2018, pp. 60-68

Peterson, Jennifer, “Mary Weatherford,” Gagosian, Fall 2018, pp. 60-68

Peterson, Jennifer, “Mary Weatherford,” Gagosian, Fall 2018, pp. 60-68

Peterson, Jennifer, “Mary Weatherford,” Gagosian, Fall 2018, pp. 60-68

Peterson, Jennifer, “Mary Weatherford,” Gagosian, Fall 2018, pp. 60-68

Peterson, Jennifer, “Mary Weatherford,” Gagosian, Fall 2018, pp. 60-68

Peterson, Jennifer, “Mary Weatherford,” Gagosian, Fall 2018, pp. 60-68

Myers, Terry R., “Mary Weatherford With Terry R. Myers,” Brooklyn Rail, September 2018, pp. cover, 25-29

Myers, Terry R., “Mary Weatherford With Terry R. Myers,” Brooklyn Rail, September 2018, pp. cover, 25-29

Myers, Terry R., “Mary Weatherford With Terry R. Myers,” Brooklyn Rail, September 2018, pp. cover, 25-29

Myers, Terry R., “Mary Weatherford With Terry R. Myers,” Brooklyn Rail, September 2018, pp. cover, 25-29

Myers, Terry R., “Mary Weatherford With Terry R. Myers,” Brooklyn Rail, September 2018, pp. cover, 25-29

Myers, Terry R., “Mary Weatherford With Terry R. Myers,” Brooklyn Rail, September 2018, pp. cover, 25-29

Smith, Roberta, “The Paint Remains The Point,” The New York Times, September 28, 2018, p. C15

Smith, Roberta, “The Paint Remains The Point,” The New York Times, September 28, 2018, p. C15

Zara, Janelle, “Seeking Beauty: Five Artists Whose Eye-Opening Work You Won’t Want to Miss,” Galerie, Summer 2018, pp. 68, 70-72

“Where to buy,” The Week, Arts, April 7, 2017

Miranda, Carolina A., “Artist’s noble pursuit,” Los Angeles Times, Arts & Books, April 2, 2017, pp. F6-F7 April 2, 2017

The turning point was a Bakersfield sky.

Roughly five years ago, artist Mary Weatherford was driving around the city at dusk, a time when the heavens frequently take on otherworldly tints of sapphire, pink and orange, and the neon signs click on, one by one, their insect hums buzzing above evening traffic.

The sight inspired Weatherford, a Los Angeles painter who was then on an artistic residency at Cal State Bakersfield, to create a series of abstracted landscapes that employed ordinary paint-oncanvas in combination with luminous bits of neon light. In works such as 2012’s “Ruby II (Thrifty Mart),” overlapping pools of diaphanous blue and orange paint are divided by the brilliant line of red neon tube that hovers over the surface of the canvas.

The works, says Weatherford, are “about what’s going in the peripheral vision. It’s motion.”

The pieces aren’t so much literal portraits of place as they are broad evocations — a physical embodiment of the sensation one gets tooling along a broad avenue in the San Joaquin Valley as the sun dissolves into the horizon.

“I hold an experience in my head,” she adds. “What’s the experience? What’s the experience?

And I paint that experience.”

Weatherford is tall and graceful, with a mane of red-brown hair that cascades below her shoulders. The Ojai-born artist is most delighted when she is talking about painting, that of others and her own: The works by Diego Velazquez she saw on a recent trip to Madrid. The Belgian linen she uses as canvas. The alchemical fusions of color, light and material that compose a piece.

“Purple is so hard,” she says, as she places herself on a chair at the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, where she is currently showing more than a dozen new works. “[Mark] Rothko is the mastermind of purple.”

The exhibition shows Weatherford pushing her technique in new directions: Letting her colorful forms dance in looser arrangements and working at a larger scale. A suite of four paintings in the north gallery extends to a length of almost 20 feet, some bearing pieces of neon so impossibly elongated, they take on a thread-like fragility.

“When you pick it up, it’s like a piece of spaghetti,” she says, gesturing toward a length of blue neon. “Glass bends. I can’t even watch.”

These pieces represent an important moment in her career.

For all of her adult life, she has steadily made art, even as she took on various day jobs to support herself: working in a bookstore, an art gallery and for other artists. “Art has been my through line,” she says. “I’ve never stopped painting no matter what was happening.”

When she was starting out in the late 1980s, she tackled appropriation. In subsequent years, Weatherford turned her attention to landscape, both urban and wild, creating paintings that featured sky, caves and tangled vegetation. Throughout her career, her work has drawn critical notice. (In 1990, New York Times critic Roberta Smith reviewed an early show, describing her sense of color as “unusual and promising.”)

But since 2012, when Weatherford began incorporating neon into her increasingly expressive canvases, her work has drawn a heightened level of interest from the art world.

The Bakersfield paintings were shown in art spaces in Los Angeles and New York. By 2013, she had signed on with Kordansky.

The following year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York included a number of her works in the exhibition “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World.” The painting “the light in Lancaster,” after the Mojave Desert town known for its blooms of wild poppies, was featured in the exhibition catalog.

“It’s easy to make an abstract painting,” says Laura Hoptman, the MoMA curator who organized the show. “It’s very hard to make a very good abstract paint ing.”

But when she saw Weatherford’s neon-studded works at a small downtown Manhattan gallery in 2012, she says she was floored.

“They made an enormous impression,” she says. “There is this strength and ambition. There is

nothing girly and pretty about it.

There is a muscular and deliberate quality to the way that she is moving paint around.”

In 2019, the artist will be the subject of her first retrospective at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Kordansky, who acquired one of the painter’s works in 2012, before he represented her professionally, says Weatherford has traveled an intriguing arc.

“She didn’t have a fixed way of working,” he explains via email.

“When you look back over the last 30 years, she’s consistently defied expectations and pushed boundaries, which isn’t easy to do in a discipline as practiced as painting.”

A ‘frightening’ Van Gogh Weatherford, in the meantime, is more intrigued by discussions relating to painting than her career: The brush she purchased in Rome, the vinyl-based paint that leaves whorls of color on her canvases, the large-scale paintings she studied before she began to make large works of her own.

(In addition to visiting works by Velazquez on her recent trip to Spain, she spent ample time dissecting Picasso’s “Guernica” and El Greco’s “The Burial of the Count of Orgaz.”)

“I’m interested in the experiential quality of a large painting,” she says. “Gigantic paintings that one can relate to with one’s body rather than with one’s eyes or mind.”

Weatherford was born in Ojai, but when she was 3, her family relocated to Los Angeles’

Baldwin Hills. Roughly seven years later, they moved to San Diego. Her father was an Episcopal priest; her mother, who studied history at Stanford, ran the household — no small job in a family with five children.

Art and artists, she says, were always part of the mix, even in her early childhood years in eccentric Ojai of the 1960s.

The first painting she remembers seeing was a piece by Franklin Fireshaker, an Ojai artist of Ponca heritage known for chronicling aspects of indigenous ritual.

“They were these great, swirling peyote-inspired works,” she recalls. “They were so magical to me.”

From childhood visits back to Ojai, Weatherford has memories of a family that lived in a stone castle and another that inhabited a home designed by Lloyd Wright. “I think that’s where I got my love of Modernism,” she says.

During her family’s Los Angeles years, there were regular visits to the rose garden at Exposition Park and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. During a Van Gogh exhibition, she remembers her father holding her up in front of the painter’s “Wheatfield with Crows,” from 1890, so she could examine it closely.

“He told me, ‘This is the most frightening painting I’ve seen in my life,’” says Weatherford. “As a child, you say, ‘I’m going to consider this and consider what’s frightening about it.’ I really looked. It’s a very frightening painting.”

She attended Princeton University as a way of getting out of California. “I loved seasons and

Miranda, Carolina A., “Artist’s noble pursuit,” Los Angeles Times, Arts & Books, April 2, 2017, pp. F6-F7

seeing snow and the East Coast and history,” she says. “When I flew to New York City, I was like, ‘Wow, this is cool!’ I wanted to be near Broadway and the theater.”

At Princeton, she was introduced to the work of conceptual artists who would make her rethink the nature of art — in particular, the photographer Sherrie Levine, an appropriation artist known for re-photographing famous works of art by figures such as Walker Evans. Weatherford says she was intrigued by the idea of authorship and how it could be claimed as an artistic gesture —

and the ways in which a woman, claiming a man’s work, could resonate in poignant ways.

“I thought the ‘[After] Walker Evans’ series was end-game work,” she says. “Really strong, feminist work.”

After she graduated in 1984 with a degree in visual arts and art history, Weatherford settled in New York City, where she completed the Whitney Independent Study Program, and much later, a master of fine arts at Bard College. In a small apartment on the Upper West Side, she made art — in the early days, color experiments inspired by the works of Modernist Josef Albers — and worked a succession of day jobs.

Among the most intriguing: a gig at the Paula Cooper Gallery, where she helped organize the image archives.

“I saw every Elizabeth Murray ever made,” she says. “Every Carl Andre ever made. Every Donald Judd ever made … I met Elizabeth Murray, who was very supportive of my work. The roster was legendary. It was the height of awesome Paula Cooper-ness.”

She returned to Los Angeles in 1999, where she continued to work and paint and show her work in galleries in Los Angeles, as well as in places such as Chicago and New York. In 2008, she was featured in the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. Then came Bakersfield — and the moment in which Weatherford threw painterly caution to the wind and had the audacity to place neon tubes, their artfully arranged electrical cords in full view, on top of her paintings.

“If the wires ran behind the painting, you’d have a beer sign, not a painting,” she says. “Nothing is hidden.”

The wires’ looping forms, in fact, evoke the delicate, latex rope installations of Eva Hesse. “I was a sculptor when I was an undergraduate,” says Weatherford with a wry smile, revealing that nothing in her work is unintentional.

Since 2012, the artist has created paint-and-neon works inspired

by the tones and light of New York City, as well the less conspicuous corners of Los Angeles: Pico Rivera, Artesia and Oxnard.

“I’ve never wanted to make paintings about Sunset Boulevard or the center of Los Angeles,” she explains. “I was more interested in the edges of Los Angeles.”

The new works at Kordansky feature a more indirect take on her experiences of her environment, but here and there, a title reveals a location — such as “Arroyo walk,” from 2017, a vertical canvas that features the steely grey of L.A.’s concrete river banks and a slash of orange that hearkens to construction barricades. A single tube of white neon emerges from a pool of greenish blue.

“They’re sublime explorations of atmosphere, ambiance and light,” says Kordansky. “They’re also commitments of an emotional, subjective kind — physical reflections of moods and positions.

They’re diaristic indexes of life lived, personal but also political.”

At the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum at Claremont McKenna College hangs a large-scale

work from 2014 titled “From the mountain to the sea,” which features a roiling mass of inky blues sliced by yellow and white neon lights — godly nature and human artifice on their endless collision course.

Weatherford says she is intrigued by the nature of an atmosphere at a given point in time. “[Explorer Giovanni di] Verrazzano’s entry into New York Harbor and meeting the Native Americans — he writes about what a lovely day it was,” she says. “I’m always interested in the weather, what the weather was at a certain time.”

“The night the Watts Riots started, it was 8 o’clock and 71 degrees.”

Knight, Christopher, “Watercolors in sensuous form,” Los Angeles Times, March 28, 2017, p. E2

Guadagnino, Kate, “Bright Spot,” T Magazine, March 5, 2017, p. 58

Steiner, Rochelle, “Mary Weatherford,” Vitamin P3: New Perspective in Painting, London and New York: Phaidon, 2016, pp. 320-323

Steiner, Rochelle, “Mary Weatherford,” Vitamin P3: New Perspective in Painting, London and New York: Phaidon, 2016, pp. 320-323

Steiner, Rochelle, “Mary Weatherford,” Vitamin P3: New Perspective in Painting, London and New York: Phaidon, 2016, pp. 320-323

Steiner, Rochelle, “Mary Weatherford,” Vitamin P3: New Perspective in Painting, London and New York: Phaidon, 2016, pp. 320-323

McMahon, Katherine, “L.A. Habitat: Mary Weatherford,” ArtNews.com, April 1, 2016

L.A. HABITAT: MARY WEATHERFORD

BY Katherine McMahon April 1, 2016

Mary Weatherford in her Cypress Park studio on December 8, 2015.

This week’s studio: Mary Weatherford; Cypress Park, Los Angeles.

“Los Angeles is on fire,” Mary Weatherford said, lounging in the outdoor space behind her Cypress Park studio. The Ojai-born, Los Angeles–raised artist called New York home from 1984 to 1999, but ultimately returned to the West Coast. “This is the place to be to make art right now. There’s so much going on all the time—I have an incredible fear of missing out.”

Weatherford’s studio, a space she’s inhabited for two years, is situated in an unassuming building along the heavily trafficked San Fernando Road. She explained that the corridor on which her studio is located is becoming increasingly desirable as more and more condos go up and businesses go in. “Hopefully I won’t get priced out. My previous studio wasn’t nearly as big as this. It was handed down from artist to artist and had been occupied by Laura Owens, Matt Connors, Alex Slade, and Rebecca Morris, to name a few.

So much great art was made in that studio,” she said, recalling that her landlord at the time purposefully kept the rent low because he liked having artists as tenants.

Weatherford currently serves on the board of the arts nonprofit Laxart, and described L.A. as a mecca for alternative spaces. “The hallmark of a great arts scene and a healthy city is artist-run spaces, and this place is flourishing. There’s a lot of opportunity,” she said, mentioning 356 Mission, Joan, and BBQ L.A. In addition to smaller, artist-run endeavors, Weatherford feels that museums on the West Coast are more accessible then ever. “Everyone’s vision is influenced by one’s experiences,” she said, recalling visits to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as an example of a formative childhood experience. “I remember going to that museum and stopping by the cafeteria to order coconut cream pie.

There was a big painting on the wall of the cafeteria there. I think it fostered my love of cafeteria paintings.” Her 2014 mural From the mountain to the sea is part of Claremont College’s collection, on view in the dining room of the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum.

McMahon, Katherine, “L.A. Habitat: Mary Weatherford,” ArtNews.com, April 1, 2016 Weatherford has exhibited since the late ’80s and continues a prolific studio practice. “I go through different phases of making work that looks seemingly anomalous to the work that came before,” she said, clarifying, “The themes and ideas that run through the last 40 years of the work are consistent, but the physical manifestation of the themes is very different.” The works in her breakthrough series, “The Bakersfield Project,” in which she debuted her trademark paintings affixed with neon lights in 2012, are named after streets in the California city. A sense of place seems to pervade Weatherford’s work, recently with neon paintings that illustrate Los Angeles and New York but previously with literal depictions of seashells and starfish, which she would source from the California seaside. “I don’t keep a journal,” she said. “I can’t write about myself and my life, but I’ve always thought that my paintings are, in effect, my journal. I can look at a painting and remember what was going on at that time.”

In 2018 the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston will present a survey of Weatherford’s work, curated by Bill Arning. Below, a look around her Los Angeles studio.

Siegel, Katy, ed, The Heroine Paint: After Frankenthaler, S.l.: Gagosian / Rizzoli, 2015, p. 242-245

Siegel, Katy, ed, The Heroine Paint: After Frankenthaler, S.l.: Gagosian / Rizzoli, 2015, p. 242-245

Siegel, Katy, ed, The Heroine Paint: After Frankenthaler, S.l.: Gagosian / Rizzoli, 2015, p. 242-245

Siegel, Katy, ed, The Heroine Paint: After Frankenthaler, S.l.: Gagosian / Rizzoli, 2015, p. 242-245

Williams, Maxwell, “There’s Something About Mary,” Cultured Magazine, Fall 2015, Cover, Contents, p. 170-173

Williams, Maxwell, “There’s Something About Mary,” Cultured Magazine, Fall 2015, Cover, Contents, p. 170-173

Williams, Maxwell, “There’s Something About Mary,” Cultured Magazine, Fall 2015, Cover, Contents, p. 170-173

Williams, Maxwell, “There’s Something About Mary,” Cultured Magazine, Fall 2015, Cover, Contents, p. 170-173

Williams, Maxwell, “There’s Something About Mary,” Cultured Magazine, Fall 2015, Cover, Contents, p. 170-173

Greenberger, Alex, “Mary Weatherford”, Reviews: New York, ArtNews, November 2015, p. 98

Ebony, David, “Mary Weatherford,” Art in America, October 2015

Mary Weatherford NEW YORK, at Brennan & Griffin

by David Ebony A selection of eight sprawling paint-and-neon-light canvases by Mary Weatherford was an inspired choice for inaugurating this Lower East Side gallery’s cavernous new satellite space in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. In preparation for the show, titled “Mary Weatherford: Red Hook,” the Los Angeles artist, who lived in New York in the 1990s, returned to the city for several months to study this once-thriving port on New York Harbor. It’s a procedure she frequently adopts in anticipation of an exhibition in a new space.

Produced over the past two years, the works on view—literally luminous abstract compositions—can be seen as following the course of a day, from sunrise to sunset, in the midst of an industrial urban setting. The colors and textures of the works indicate the shifting light, atmosphere and mood that she observed during her visit. The allover compositions contain exuberant brushstrokes that never quite reach the edges of the canvas, which are typically left blank.

A thin tube or two of neon lighting, usually oriented vertically or horizontally, punctuate each canvas, the wiring and transformer plainly visible.

Using Flashe, a vinyl-based paint offering a wide variety of nuanced textures—from a watercolorlike translucence to a velvety matte feel—Weatherford evokes the nearby Hudson and East rivers with vibrant splashes of blues, ranging from pale aquamarine to steely blue-gray. Always complementing rather than fighting the painted surfaces, the glowing tubes suggest different times of day, while also providing an allusion to commercial signage in the urban environment.

Mary Weatherford: past Sunset, 2015, Flashe and neon light on linen, 112 by 99 inches; at Brennan & Griffin.

A piece such as dawn Channel might be viewed as marking the beginning of the cycle, with two red neon tubes in a “V” shape traversing the canvas. The work, indeed, dramatically conveys the warm glow of morning light as it illuminates a sleepy harbor.

At the other end of the cycle, past Sunset features a vertical tube of bright pink neon down the center of the canvas. It promises the soothing calm of the evening as well as a hot night on the town.

The excitement of Weatherford’s work stems from such unexpected associations, and also from the contradictory nature of her chosen materials. Her use of neon lighting as a kind of drawing in space often recalls works by Keith Sonnier. The lights, however, somehow serve to restrain Weatherford’s painting sensibility, which is fundamentally romantic and unabashedly allied with late AbEx and Color Field compositions, especially the Veils of Morris Louis, which she has acknowledged as an influence. Over the past decade or so, Weatherford has refined this hybrid form, fusing the realms of painting and installation in a unique way. Her aims have never been better realized than in this exhibition inspired by the shifting light of an industrial neighborhood.

Griffin, Nora, “Mary Weatherford Red Hook,” brooklynrail.org, July 13, 2015

Mary Weatherford Red Hook

by Nora Griffin July 13th, 2015

Mary Weatherford, Engine, 2014. Flashe and neon on linen, 117 × 104 in. Courtesy Brennan & Griffin. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio.

Painters tell themselves stories in order to keep painting. In the case of Mary Weatherford, a Los Angeles-based artist, the stories are connected to specific places and her visual memories of them. Her signature Flashe paint and neon combines have had three prominent iterations: “Manhattan” and “The Bakersfield Paintings” in 2012, and “Los Angeles” in 2014. Her current show, “Red Hook,” inaugurates Brennan & Griffin’s new space in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Weatherford created the suite of eight paintings in tandem with the Lower East Side gallery’s leasing of the former metal castings warehouse earlier this year. The paintings are commanding in scale, measuring 117 × 104˝, with one at 112 × 99˝. The works are installed vertically in sets of four and three on two facing walls. A single painting anchors the back wall and draws the viewer inside. Located on a quiet side street off the main thoroughfare of Van Brunt Street, the gallery is airy and industrial, with beams of metal and wood supporting an arched ceiling, a cracked and smooth concrete floor, and dark brick walls. An open garage door lets in abundant sunlight and the low level surrounding buildings lend a meditative aura to the show.

Griffin, Nora, “Mary Weatherford Red Hook,” brooklynrail.org, July 13, 2015 In a departure from Weatherford’s previous work, the “Red Hook” paintings embrace a scattered formlessness.

They have the countenance of exploding blotting pads, the paint is silky and matte like photographic emulsion, and the colors are high octane. The tumult of strokes calls to mind a flattened Joan Mitchell painting, made by a giant’s paw and soaked in water. The messy expressionism knows itself too well to be vulnerable, but the twisted lines of neon add a physicality and emotional presence otherwise lacking in the paint. In Engine (2014) and past Sunset (2015), tubes of orange, pink, and magenta neon are deliciously radiant against mottled blue-black. In other works the neon replicates patches of color and serves as an electrified extension of the watery vinyl paint.

The yellow horizontal neon of Out by Coney (2014) levitates over an area of diluted cadmium yellow, and in Canal (2015) a vertical grouping of neon in bright blue, aquamarine, green and red magnify their paint counterpart on the linen’s surface. Lush, light cobalt is the leading star of the Beautiful Lake (2015). Red-orange and dirty yellow offset the blues and the colors smear and become more transparent as they push towards the edges of the linen. A short, soft white neon affixed to the lower right corner appears like an object amid this watery mass. The energy of neon white bounces off the milky white of the surface. Subtle shifts in hue from work to work invite the viewer to share in the artist’s deeply felt knowledge of color.

Weatherford’s paintings have been compared to Barnett Newman’s zips, Morris Louis’s stained canvases, and the sculptures of Dan Flavin and Keith Sonnier. Beyond these formal similarities, the configuration of neon and absorbent paint offers a new move to the old dance around the limits of abstract painting. What does it mean to attach neon, a cosmic chemical, to a medium and a style that promises infinite returns, yet has been historically debased as “dead.” The tubes are screwed into the surface, supported by thin, almost invisible wires, and long sweeping extension cords connect to grey boxy chargers plugged into wall sockets. The paintings breathe in this unholy configuration, as a body on life support remains conscious with the aid of advanced technology.

Griffin, Nora, “Mary Weatherford Red Hook,” brooklynrail.org, July 13, 2015 On the other side of this intimation of mortality, the paintings undoubtedly seduce with their material presence: the texture and strength of the Belgian linen, the tight stretching on large-scale supports, and the chromatic richness of Flashe. Another pleasure is in the referential nature of the neon colors and forms, most readily apparent in the “Manhattan” series. For instance, in Brooklyn Bridge (2013), two vertical neon strips, warm yellow next to turquoise, are conjoined at their bases by a looping cord, mimicking the bridge’s suspension cables. In Palm Reader (2013), a curving line of purple neon is instantly recognizable to New Yorkers as the color of the signage that announces storefront psychics. The light brightens and is absorbed into the purple and black Flashe puddle beneath it.

The blue variations and splashy paint handling of the “Red Hook” paintings imply an equivalency to water, but it is here that an observable relationship to the city’s oldest harbor ends. The rest is poetic conjecture. A walk around the neighborhood’s streets takes one past industrial complexes, grass lots, 19th-century brick houses, and abandoned factories with crumbling painted signs. Graffiti is prevalent, though not as aggressive tags, but as more indeterminate lines and forms. Pedestrians have the time and space to regard you, and even say hello, an anomaly in New York City. A grey cat lies down in the middle of the street blending in with the tarmac. As the sun sets at Valentino Pier you can observe, all at once, the Statue of Liberty, the glittery mirage of Wall Street, and the journey of an illuminated Staten Island Ferry. Perhaps it was in moments similar to these that Weatherford found her source material. But more importantly than the artist’s own relationship to this area, it is the viewer who will emerge from the show with a more complex appreciation of a city in flux and stillness.

Zwick, Tracy, “Present Tense,” Cultured, February/March 2015, pp. 170-173

Zwick, Tracy, “Present Tense,” Cultured, February/March 2015, pp. 170-173

Zwick, Tracy, “Present Tense,” Cultured, February/March 2015, pp. 170-173

Solway, Diane and Fan Zhong, “Brushes with Greatness,” W Art, December 2014/January 2015, pp. 90, 92

Solway, Diane and Fan Zhong, “Brushes with Greatness,” W Art, December 2014/January 2015, pp. 90, 92

“50 Women Artists Worth Watching,” Art+Auction, September 2014

“50 Women Artists Worth Watching,” Art+Auction, September 2014

Meyer, Megan, “Light and Space,” C Magazine, September 2014

Williams, Maxwell, “Mary Weatherford: L.A. Confidential,” ArtinAmerica.com, May 19, 2014

Mary Weatherford was sitting in the middle of Los Angeles’s David Kordansky Gallery the day before the opening of her show “Los Angeles” (through May 31), her first with the gallery, inspecting her new paintings. Hanging on the walls were large color-driven abstract paintings, each with a neon light or three, the cords dangling bare, leading into transformers on the floor. Weatherford was racking her brain for memories or moods that connect the “Los Angeles” part of her mind with the part that paints the abstractions in hopes of finding that “voilà” moment that would spur her recall, because something was missing.

“There’s one last painting that needs a title,” said the L.A.-based artist, 51, her flecked eyes intensely scanning the canvas. The painting in question—a bleary murk that might be mistaken for lingering nightfall (or more accurately the “magic hour” that cinematographers call the fading light of sundown), punctuated with a bolt of neon light affixed to the canvas—will ultimately be called 1969, a year that is pregnant with history both societal and personal.

“I knew that I had to make a Los Angeles show,” said Weatherford, who moved with her family to Los Angeles from nearby Ojai at the height of the Civil Rights movement, in the late ‘60s. The personal elements are purposefully obscured—the paintings, after they are finished, take on a meaning to Weatherford, and the titles are buried clues to the diaristic impulse. The canvases in the current show feature titles like over Rose Hills (Rose Hills is a cemetery in Whittier, Calif.), Oxnard Ventura, the light in Lancaster (famous for its blooming poppy fields), and apparition in Artesia, each laying out some raw sentiment, whether experiential or mood-driven: family histories and personal memorials abound in the work, but remain obfuscated.

Williams, Maxwell, “Mary Weatherford: L.A. Confidential,” ArtinAmerica.com, May 19, 2014

Weatherford has worked with the concept of place for many years, but the neons added another level to her work. Despite being active since the ‘80s, her true breakout show wasn’t until 2012, “The Bakersfield Project,” at the Todd Madigan Gallery at California State University at Bakersfield, where she was invited to conceive of a show for which she could collaborate with students. The Bakersfield paintings, in much the same way the L.A. paintings are about Weatherford’s history of Los Angeles, were made in similarly abstract ways about the weird central California town known for oil fields and pistachios. Not being the type of painter that cedes the actual paintbrush, Weatherford originally came up with the idea of adhering neons to the work simply as a way to include the students. The show eventually traveled to LA><.

Her later 2012 show “Manhattan,” at Brennan & Griffin, featured similar location-painting-plus-neons that Weatherford saw as conveying narratives of everyday life related to her time in New York in the ‘80s (Varick St. was stepping onto the street in the morning, Wonder Wheel was a trip down to Coney Island, and Empire represented glancing up at the Empire State Building on the way home in the evening).

That show was a look back. After graduating from Princeton, she toiled in New York until 1999, when she moved back to Southern California. She received critical acceptance in the years following, but seemed to be caught in a state of perpetual emergence-reviews in ArtForum and the New York Times in the mid-2000s, inclusion in Christopher Knight’s 2007 “45 Painters Under 45” article in the L.A. Times, selection to the 2008 California Biennial, a Rachel Kushner article calling her a “new blue chip” artist in 2009. Last year, an anonymous poll of curators, gallerists, and advisors identified her as one of “L.A.’s Hottest Artists.” [For the record, the author of this article organized the poll.]

In “Los Angeles,” her history with the city erupts onto the canvas. Each painting carries a memory or a feeling from her past, albeit with abstract execution—more like representations of an idea of a place. The paintings become gauzy mindscapes (not landscapes, mind you, but something much more vulnerable and cerebral), rendered with Flashe vinyl-based acrylic paint that stains and swirls on the canvas in color fields, before being lyrically interrupted by thin vines of colored neon light. The neon causes a push-and-pull with the viewer’s attention, at times drawing the eye towards it, and at other times disappearing into a negative space that frames the paintings underneath, highlighting the canvas. Shadows play behind the neons, adding new levels of texture, while the cords from the lights themselves act as sculptural, draped lines.

Williams, Maxwell, “Mary Weatherford: L.A. Confidential,” ArtinAmerica.com, May 19, 2014

When prodded for specificity, Weatherford provides scant details into her Angeleno past. “My childhood was swimming lessons in Inglewood, and then going over to Exposition Park and then up to [the Los Angeles County Museum of Art],” where she would see the seminal 1971 “Art and Technology” exhibition at the receptive age of nine—the show paired artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Richard Serra, Rockne Krebs, Robert Irwin and James Turrell with techoriented corporations like Kaiser Industries, GE and IBM. Later, after Weatherford moved to the East Coast to study at Princeton, she would find a catalog of the show in the library there, leading her to identify the works she had had stored in her mind.

“My introduction to the broader possibilities of art happened on a field trip to see that show,” she said about her early education to contemporary practice. The LACMA show’s convergence of historical art practices and technological innovation are hinted at in Weatherford’s simultaneous use of abstract paint and neon as a paint stroke. For their part, the painted areas flirt historically with 1960s Color Field works— particularly Ronnie Landfield and Helen Frankenthaler—and some of the neons “zip” down the middle like a plugged-in Barnett Newman.

“The thing that unites these as ‘Los Angeles’ paintings is the light—not the neons, but in the painting,” Weatherford said, pointing out the grays, browns, ochres and greens that play off each other formally. “Los Angeles used to have ‘smog days,’ when you didn’t have to go to school. I was aware of living in a smog basin from the time I was little. So, what I tried to do in this show was to make the colors dirty.”

To Weatherford, the neons could be the city lights of the Los Angeles she’s conjuring, but more than that, they solved a problem she’d been struggling with for years.

“When I had the idea about the lights two years ago, I realized that it was a way to make a painting about the city and about the 20th century,” Weatherford said. “It’s electricity. It’s Modernism.”

Images: Mary Weatherford, 1969, 2014, Flashe and neon on linen, 93 1/3 by 79 1/2 by 4 1/8 inches. Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, Calif. Photo Fredrik Nilsen.

Mary Weatherford, over Rose Hills, 2014, Flashe and neon on linen 93 1/2 by 79 1/2 by 3 3/4 inches. Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, Calif. Photo Fredrik Nilsen.

Mary Weatherford, over Rose Hills (detail), 2014, Flashe and neon on linen 93 1/2 by 79 1/2 by 3 3/4 inches. Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, Calif. Photo Fredrik Nilsen.

Cha, Olivian, “Critics’ Picks: Mary Weatherford,” Artforum.com, May 6, 2014

Los Angeles

Mary Weatherford

DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY 3143 South La Cienega Boulevard, Unit A April 19–May 31 Following a series of exhibitions titled “The Bakersfield Project,” “The Bakersfield Paintings” and “Manhattan,” (all 2012), “Los Angeles” is Mary Weatherford’s fourth show of neon-light paintings that takes inspiration from the places she has lived. As in her former work, lines of light in various colors, lengths, and convexities uniquely illuminate each of the seven paintings on view here—but the color palette compared is decidedly less pavonine.

Flashe paint is applied in thin but muddled layers that permeate each canvas with a kind of dirty acrylic pollution. In most of the pieces, brighter hues of pink, yellow, and orange are weighed down by washes of deep blue purples, marshy greens, and black. Light in Lancaster, painted in vibrant, tannic shades of orange, is the exception: Heavily worked surfaces are evidenced by repetitive, gestural brush strokes that garble colors but also challenge the margins of their linen support, sometimes touching and other times retracting from the edges of the canvas. In contrast, Mary Weatherford, 1969, 2014, flashe and neon on linen, Weatherford’s brilliant neon lines effortlessly 93 1/4 x 79 1/5 x 4 1/8” rewrite the structural boundaries of painting by casting light in three dimensions, against painterly surface and viewer simultaneously. Neon has its own aesthetic history, which has traversed Las Vegas kitsch, Minimalism, and Conceptual art but rarely the painterly sublime.

Locational marginality is further addressed in the titles of her paintings: Oxnard Ventura, apparition in Artesia, and the light in Lancaster identify suburbs and industrial cities on the outer fringes of the metropolis for which the show is named. Weatherford’s privilege of place and geographic

Cha, Olivian, “Critics’ Picks: Mary Weatherford,” Artforum.com, May 6, 2014 specificity in the conception of her works also offers a compelling proposition for how painting might newly articulate sociospatial production and meaning. By exposing the cords, electrical transformers, and hardware that charge her neon lines, Weatherford’s paintings render the city not only as landscape (or abstract expression) but as network: a series of electrified canvases that signal both topology and topography. Each painterly node is connected to the others by wires that circulate a single source of energy; this gives the paintings a sculptural and spatial register and, more importantly, a social one. This material interconnectedness is perhaps just one response to the possibility of metaphysical inquiry in a late-capitalist society.

-Olivian Cha

Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter, “Mary Weatherford at David Kordansky Gallery,” KCRW.com, May 1, 2014

Art Talk

Mary Weatherford at David Kordansky Gallery Thurs May 1, 2014

Host: Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

Installation view of Mary Weatherford, Los Angeles at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, California

If you thought that the soft focus Color Field painting of Helen Frankenthaler couldn’t be revisited successfully by a contemporary artist, you wouldn’t be alone. How could an artist paint thinned acrylics onto raw canvas without seeming as though he or she was copying that group of artists who were propelled to stardom by the critic Clement Greenberg in the 1960’s?

Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter, “Mary Weatherford at David Kordansky Gallery,” KCRW.com, May 1, 2014

But now there is Mary Weatherford, an artist who has been gathering attention for her accomplished abstract paintings for some time. The paintings themselves have grown grand and romantic, darkly dashing and dynamic, tossing and turning with light and shade like the windy skies of a Turner seascape. Each bears an unlikely addition: a bar or two of neon with its electrical cord and equipment exposed. The combination is startling. When similar works were exhibited in New York, the Times critic Roberta Smith used a most astute phrase. She described her art has having an “ecumenical historical awareness.”

Mary Weatherford, “the light in Lancaster,” 2014 Flashe and neon on linen, 112.25 x 99.25 x 4.375 inches, (285.1 x 252.1 x 11.1 cm)

Mary Weatherford, “Oxnard Ventura,” 2014, Flashe and neon on linen, 112.5 x 100 x 4.375 inches (285.8 x 254 x 11.1 cm)

Titled Los Angeles, on view at David Kordansky Gallery through May 31, this show includes seven rectangular linen canvases in the range of eight to ten feet tall and almost as wide in vertical orientation, which fights any easy attempt to see them as traditional landscapes. Yet, landscape is at least partially in the mix. Named for various points around Southern California, such as the particularly spectacular the light in Lancaster, 2014 she brushes a paint called Flashe in loose gestures of tangerine, copper, and rose.

An angled bar of neon is attached over the completed painting but manages to accentuate rather than compete with the rich layers of color.

Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter, “Mary Weatherford at David Kordansky Gallery,” KCRW.com, May 1, 2014

Mary Weatherford, “Oxnard Ventura,” 2014, Flashe and neon on linen, 112.5 x 100 x 4.375 inches (285.8 x 254 x 11.1 cm)

She did a series for New York but the LA paintings made me think of moments of driving when the sky is a delirious riot of sunlight and fog or bruised nocturnal shades and you pass a neon sign for gas or beer. LA offers that momentary cocktail of the mystic and the urban and Weatherford captures that special thrill in these paintings. For more information, go to DavidKordanskyGallery.com.

Knight, Christopher, “Review: Mary Weatherford’s seductive paintings marvels of abstraction,” Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2014, pp. D1, D3

Knight, Christopher, “Review: Mary Weatherford’s seductive paintings marvels of abstraction,” Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2014, pp. D1, D3

Schwabsky, Barry, “Mary Weatherford,” Artforum, Reviews, December 2012, p. 277

Peetz, John Arthur, “Mary Weatherford,” Artforum.com, Critics’ Picks, September 28, 2012

55 Delancey St NY, NY 10002 T 212.227.0115 F www.brennangriffin.com

Knight, Christopher, “Flourishing on their vines,” Los Angeles Times, November 11, 2008, p. E19

55 Delancey St NY, NY 10002 T 212.227.0115 F www.brennangriffin.com info@brennangriffin.com

Sholis, Brian, “Mary Weatherford,” Artforum.com, June 19, 2006

Mary Weatherford SHANE CAMPBELL 836 Wenonah Ave May 13–July 01

The three midsize canvases in this Los Angeles– based artistʼs exhibition, each a slightly different view of the same rocky outcrop, would be of little interest were they not so well executed; instead, they argue convincingly for the value of painting directly from life. Each skillfully fuses two currently unfashionable artistic traditions: Look at them from a few feet away, and the compositions are reminiscent of the kind of by-the-sea plein air painting that Courbet and Monet practiced in Normandy circa 1870; zoom in on almost any part of a canvas, and your field of vision is filled with a harmonious, semiabstract chromatic reverie Mary Weatherford, apparition, 2006 that evokes early-twentieth-century practitioners on

both sides of the Atlantic, from Sonia Delaunay and Franz Marc to Georgia OʼKeeffe and Joseph Stella. Rendered in flashe, a vinyl-based paint that doesnʼt lose the intensity of its color when diluted with water (as Weatherford has done here), these works register changes in sunlight upon the rock formation by altering the compositionʼs dominant hue: apparition, 2006, is reddish pink; after Hodler, 2006, is reddish orange; shadow, 2005, is bluish green. These colors have been applied with diaphanous, mostly vertical, soft-edged brushstrokes, and the shimmering effect grants the hulking mass dreamlike airiness and grace.

Mahoney, Robert, “Mary Weatherford,” Time Out New York, January 4-11, 2001, p. 46

55 Delancey St NY, NY 10002 T 212.227.0115 F

Schwabsky, Barry, “Mary Weatherford: Works on Paper, Thomas Korzelius Fine Art, New York,” Art on Paper, March-April 1999, p. 64

Princenthal, Nancy, “Mary Weatherford at Debs & Co.,” Art in America, July 1998, p. 92

Rubenstein, Meyer Raphael, Postcards from Alphaville: Jean-Luc Godard in Contemporary Art 1963-1992, P.S. 1, New York: Institute for Contemporary Art, 1992

Rubenstein, Meyer Raphael, Postcards from Alphaville: Jean-Luc Godard in Contemporary Art 1963-1992, P.S. 1, New York: Institute for Contemporary Art, 1992

Zinsser, John, “Geometry and its Discontents,” Tema Celeste, Autumn 1991, No. 32-33, pp. 72-76

Zinsser, John, “Geometry and its Discontents,” Tema Celeste, Autumn 1991, No. 32-33, pp. 72-76

Zinsser, John, “Geometry and its Discontents,” Tema Celeste, Autumn 1991, No. 32-33, pp. 72-76

Zinsser, John, “Geometry and its Discontents,” Tema Celeste, Autumn 1991, No. 32-33, pp. 72-76

Zinsser, John, “Geometry and its Discontents,” Tema Celeste, Autumn 1991, No. 32-33, pp. 72-76

Hunter, Sam, Emerging Art 1990, Trenton: New Jersey State Art Museum, 1990

Sam Hunter, New Directions, New York: S. Bitter Larkin Gallery, 1990

Smith, Roberta, “Fresh, Hot and Headed for Fame,” The New York Times, January 5, 1990

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