Ellen Lesperance: 2020 Frederick Hammersley Artist Residency

ELLEN LESPERANCE

2020 FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY ARTIST RESIDENCY

ELLEN LESPERANCE at Tamarind Institute 2020 FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY ARTIST RESIDENCY

Support provided by Frederick Hammersley Fund for the Arts at the Albuquerque Community Foundation

2

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

Contents

5

Introduction Diana Gaston, Director

7

Print/Making: Ellen Lesperance at Tamarind Institute Julia Bryan-Wilson

15

Ellen Lesperance in the Workshop 2020 Frederick Hammersley Artist Residency

25

Tamarind Editions

46

Frederick Hammersley Artist Residency

48

Tamarind Institute

3

4

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

Introduction Diana Gaston, Director Tamarind Institute

Ellen Lesperance arrived at Tamarind Institute in the summer of 2020, amid widespread demonstrations, wildfires, and a global pandemic. She made the trip by car for the high desert adventure in collaborative printmaking, driving with her family from their home base in Portland to Albuquerque for a four-week residency.

The Frederick Hammersley Artist Residency invites artists who are new to printmaking to explore the possibilities of lithography with the guidance of a team of skilled printers. Lesperance brought reference materials and a plan to render a trio of 20th century female activists through their garments.

Her practice involves the close study of archival photographs of women-led protests, then mapping out and recreating their sweaters and outerwear through paintings and knitted objects; the research supports an exacting recreation of the protestors’ garments, which she articulates as two-dimensional gridded patterns. Lesperance brings a new representation of the female body through the formal structure of American Symbol Craft, celebrating feminist activism and the enduring spirit of peaceful protest through a hand-drawn language of knitwear. Her garments stand in for iconic and anonymous activists and warriors through time,

with humanizing details called out in small embellishments, badges, pins and symbolic sweater patterns.

Lesperance infuses the garments with a kind of quiet defiance, giving them the weight of a tribute.

There are echoes of the modernist painter Frederick Hammersley in Lesperance’s use of the grid structure and her impeccable design sensibility.

During her residency she utilized lithography’s capacity for both transparency and opacity to experiment broadly with the interaction of color through multiple layers. Tamarind and its crew of printers relish the opportunity to bridge the properties of the medium with the creative ideas of the artist.

This collaboration produced three ambitious print editions, each title referencing the source and inspiration of the image. This project was made possible through the generous support of Frederick Hammersley Fund for the Arts at the Albuquerque Community Foundation.

5

6

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

Print/Making: Ellen Lesperance at Tamarind Institute Julia Bryan-Wilson, Doris and Clarence Malo Professor of Art History, UC Berkeley

Portland, Oregon-based artist Ellen Lesperance looks to feminist histories of resistance in her practice that is at once formally meticulous and rigorously researched. She has plumbed archives related to social movements and delved into records with a keen eye for detail in order to create artworks based on documents of women’s activism. Often working in the medium of paint (in particular gouache on paper), she frequently references the visual vocabulary of knitting pattern directions to create two-dimensional representations of garments worn by protestors at, for example, the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (1981-2000), an anti-nuclear weapon encampment in Berkshire, England. Her carefully painted patterns can be followed by those fluent in knit languages and act as concrete directions for hands-on remaking; they also suggest the radical promise of collective action.

In such works, Lesperance scrutinizes photographs, news accounts, and film footage to see what women have worn and imaginatively reconstructs their knitted sweaters and ponchos in order to create a new feminist formal language that is neither fully abstract nor tethered to masculinist ideas about figuration.

Rather, she thinks of her work in terms of “shapeliness,” in which she overlays shapes within a single

frame that reference the bodies clothed by garment patterns— including sleeves, torsos, and legs— as well as legacies of handicraft, women’s textile labors, and dissident self-fashioning.1 Another example features the knit poncho worn by Black feminist philosopher and activist Angela Davis when she was actively being pursued by the FBI in 1970. In

7

Ellen Lesperance. Wanted for Interstate Flight: Angela Yvonne Davis, August 18, 1970, 2015. Gouache and graphite on tea-stained paper. Private collection. Courtesy of the artist.

8

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

Greenham Common Peace Camp, 1987. Photograph

by Jenny Goodall. Courtesy Shutterstock.com.

her gouache and graphite piece, rendered on tea-stained paper to give it a patina, Wanted for Interstate Flight: Angela Yvonne Davis, August 18, 1970, 2015, Lesperance amplifies, dissects, and makes reproducible a critical part of Davis’s revolutionary style (the sweater she was wearing on the FBI “most wanted” poster), looking to the past to make something that can be recreated in the future. As Jongwoo Jeremy Kim writes, “…her paintings speak to the hand-medown intimacy between what is lost and what is yet to come, preserving the genealogy and geography of women fighting for causes against heteronormativity and patriarchy.”2 Over the last fifteen years, Lesperance’s sensitive and thoughtful works have been widely displayed

including Velvet Fist, a recent solo exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2020) and group shows such as Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon at New York’s New Museum in 2017, and Feminist Histories: Artists Since 2000 at the Museu of Arte de São Paulo in Brazil in 2019.3 She is at the forefront of a generation of feminist artists who are reinventing painting by contesting some of its previous terms: its insistence on originality, for one, as well as its past reliance on (often naked) female bodies as a primary site of interest. By contrast, Lesperance gestures to the femaleidentified body but she does not spectacularize it. Rather, she casts her interested, investigative gaze back on moments in which women have used their (emphatically clothed) bodies collectively to take a stand, to defy the law, to disrupt the masculinist logic of business as usual. By emphasizing garments worn during protests, Lesperance also insists on gendered bodies as they circulate within and defiantly occupy public space.

During her residence as the 2020 Frederick Hammersley Artist in Residence at Tamarind Institute, Lesperance created lithographs for the first time. While she had been exposed to woodblock prints during her undergraduate art education at the University of Washington School of Art, she took the residency as an opportunity to work with the skilled printers at Tamarind to experiment with lithography in an expanded sense—given that she was unfamiliar with its rules, she approached it with no feelings of constraint but rather let herself be open to all its possibilities. The resultant

9

Ebinger, Lesperance—who is usually solitary in her studio—recognized the benefits of collaborative making, which encouraged her to play and take risks.

Above: Video still, Can’t Beat it Alone, Amber Current Affairs Unit, 45 minutes, 1985.

Below: Handmade badge on left that Lesperance created for garments worn by Portland protesters; on right, LIFE badge recreated and hand-printed at Tamarind Institute.

three editioned prints, with their geometric lines and fastidious mark-making, are instantly recognizable as Lesperance artworks but also have unique qualities that tie them to histories of lithography, a printmaking genre known for its labor-intensive process as well as its remarkable ability to layer saturated colors.

Working closely with Tamarind Master Printer Valpuri Remling and Apprentice Printer Alyssa

10

Each of the three prints generated from Lesperance’s residency are large-scale (43” x 29”), and demonstrate the rich color palette that can be attained through lithography. Life, 2020, for instance, is the gridded matrix of a garment pattern (a hooded sweater) comprised of deep purples and blues, punctuated by two distinctly legible political embellishments: an opaque black armband with a crocheted white peace sign, and a vibrant badge in the shape of the gender symbol for “woman” that says LIFE with dangling rainbow-colored ribbons (which may or may not have had the queer associations that rainbows currently signify). Traditionally worn as a sign of mourning, the black armband became an anti-war symbol during the US conflict in Vietnam; its widespread use as an everyday protest was spearheaded by five students in Iowa in 1965.4 Political buttons, badges, pins, armbands, and other adornments serve to underscore that all dress is a form of loaded signaling; even the plainest pair of jeans conveys a wealth of meaning related to time period, region, class, race, gender, status, class, age, and many more categorizations. It is thus significant that Lesperance trains her eye on histories of sartorial defiance from the subtle to the overt.

For the mixed-media print Who Killed Karen Silkwood?, 2020, Lesperance utilized some of the

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

Who Killed Karen Silkwood? Feminist Archive South in Bristol, UK: periodical and photographer are unknown.

same matrices she deployed for Life but created a pared-down version whose muted grey colors provide the perfect foil for the printed woolen scarf folded across its surface and the pink handknit nipple pin fastened on its right side. The nipple, with its puckered fibers and evidently hand-wrought texture, highlights the surprisingly tactile nature of lithography, which historically has involved a bodily encounter with ink, paper, and

stone. Drawing from the source imagery of a photograph from c. 1983-1985 in which a group of protestors, clad entirely in mourning black, demand accountability for the death of US laboratory technician, union leader, and nuclear safety activist Karen Silkwood, Lesperance has honed in on a detail that might otherwise go overlooked, which is the nipple attached to the central figure’s pants. This somewhat odd accessory distinctly genders the

11

Above: Knitted nipple with silverleaf, detail from Who Killed Karen Silkwood?.

protest and underscores the stakes of Silkwood’s death: it declares that radioactive pollution, industrial contamination, and environmental despoliation are inextricably feminist concerns, and that Silkwood, as a mother, might have been especially concerned about these issues. The extraneous, detached nipple also functions— probably unintentionally—as a moment of almost surrealist or ghoulish humor within a scene otherwise marked by its almost oppressive seriousness.

Lesperance’s third print is a vibrantly rainbow-hued work entitled The Final Path of Feminye, 2020; generated from nine layers of ink, the piece glimmers and shines. Based on black-and-

12

white photographs of a Greenham Common camper wearing a striped sweater while performing acts of maintenance needed to keep the encampment functioning (such as carrying large containers of water), the sweater has been rendered as a riot of variegated color whose grid approximates variegated yarn. This sweater has been tracked by Lesperance over the course of many years of researching Greenham Common; she recently discovered an image that included the sweater’s back, so she was able to make this print using that extra information. Unlike the other two prints, it does not incorporate a badge or pin, but its pattern does include the labrys (the double-sided ax) and other symbols for the women’s liberation

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

movement and lesbian feminism.

One potential limiting factor inherent to the lithographic process can be the size of the plate or stone; however, with her suite of prints—two of which feature pieces of paper that have been seamed together to double the print’s surface area— Lesperance took advantage of some of the many substantial flexibilities that are also on offer with this medium. Indeed, Lesperance’s month-long process of exploration and the artistic freedom granted during her residency at Tamarind Institute have indelibly impacted her artistic practice. Several outcomes of Lesperance’s time at Tamarind, according to her, are that she has emerged more attentive to shape, to the possibilities of folding and overlapping surfaces, and to

three-dimensional elements on her work. Her time in the printmaking studio opened up new ways of thinking about transparency and embellishment, and also about collaboration as a vital aspect of feminist activism as well as feminist artistic making.

All quotes from the artist are from an interview conducted with the author, September 12, 2020.

The recording can be found at https://tamarind.unm.edu/lesperancetalk/.

1

Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, “A Maddening Kaleidoscope of Gender,” ASA/P Journal, January 4, 2018, http://asapjournal.com/a-maddeningkaleidoscope-of-gender-jongwoo-jeremy-kim/

2

Trigger was curated by Johanna Burton; Feminist Histories was curated by Isabella Rjeille.

3

In 1965, five students ages 8 to 15 in Des Moines demanded the right to wear black armbands to class despite a hostile school administration; their action became a test of free speech that went all the way to the Supreme Court (Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District, 1969; the students won).

4

Tamarind editions by Lesperance.

13

14

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

Ellen Lesperance in the Workshop 2020 Frederick Hammersley Artist Residency

Left: Lesperance in the workshop. Above Top: Lesperance drawing on mylar placed on top of a stone.

Bottom: Lesperance sharing multiple layers in process with workshop visitors.

15

Top: Proofing underway, with Master Printer Valpuri Remling and Frederick Hammersley Apprentice Printer Alyssa Ebinger at press. Bottom: Ebinger rolling out a blend.

16

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

Ebinger consulting with Lesperance on ink colors.

17

Lesperance and Ebinger compare ink colors to variegated yarn sample.

18

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

Lesperance, Remling, and Ebinger studying proofs.

19

Top: Remling and Ebinger at press. Bottom: Remling and Lesperance comparing proof variations for The Final Path of Feminye. Right: Ebinger, Lesperance, and Remling on last day of residency.

20

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

21

22

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

Alyssa Ebinger 2O20-2O21 Frederick Hammersley Apprentice Printer Alyssa Ebinger received her BS in Art Education from the Minnesota State University of Moorhead.

In 2016, she stepped away from teaching high school art to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) where she completed her MFA. She studied printmaking with an emphasis on lithography along with bookmaking, drawing, and sculpture.

She was the Lithography Graduate Assistant for Ron Wyffels during her time at PAFA and continued to be his assistant after her graduation in May 2018. After completing the one-year Tamarind Printer Training Program in 2020, Alyssa joined the Tamarind workshop as the Frederick Hammersley Apprentice Printer. She is expected to receive the designation of Tamarind Master Printer in May 2021.

Left: Ebinger rolling out a solid color. Top: Ebinger’s Printer’s Chop. Above: Ebinger observing Master Printer Valpuri Remling.

23

24

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

Tamarind Editions

25

Who Killed Karen Silkwood? (20-301) Three-color lithograph with chine collé and hand-knitted silk element Paper Size: 42 7/8 x 29 3/8 inches Paper Type: Tan Rives BFK, Thai Kozo, and Mulberry Collaborating Team: Valpuri Remling and Alyssa Ebinger Edition Printed by: Apprentice Printer Alyssa Ebinger under the direction of Master Printer Valpuri Remling Edition of 15

26

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

27

28

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

29

LIFE (20-302) Nine-color lithograph with chine collé and silverleaf Paper Size: 42 7/8 x 29 3/8 inches Paper Type: Cream Arches Cover, Thai Kozo, and Kitakata Collaborating Team: Valpuri Remling and Alyssa Ebinger Edition Printed by: Master Printer Valpuri Remling Edition of 15

30

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

31

32

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

33

The Final Path of Feminye, 2020 (20-303) Thirteen-color lithograph Paper Size: 42 1/16 x 29 3/4 inches Paper Type: Newsprint grey Somerset velvet Collaborating Printers: Valpuri Remling and Alyssa Ebinger Edition Printed by: Master Printer Valpuri Remling and Apprentice Printer Alyssa Ebinger Edition of 20

34

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

35

36

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

37

38

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

Ellen Lesperance 2020 Frederick Hammersley Artist Residency Born 1971 Minneapolis, MN Lives and works in Portland, OR

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2021 Will There Be Womanly Times?, solo exhibition, Hollybush Gardens, London, England 2020 Together we lie in ditches and in front of machines, Derek Eller Gallery, NY

Velvet Fist, Baltimore Museum of Art, MA 2019 Flowers Wrapped in Newspaper, Adams & Ollman, Portland, OR 2018 Lily of the Arc Lights, Derek Eller Gallery, New York, NY 2017 The Subjects and W.I.T.C.H, Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR 2016 Run Now Women, XO, Project Room, Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris, France

2013 It’s Never Over, Ambach & Rice, Los Angeles, CA 2011 The Strong, Star-Bright Companions, Ambach & Rice, Seattle, WA 2010 Ellen Lesperance, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA 2005 Off the Grid, Monya Rowe Gallery, New York, NY

Ellen Lesperance & Jeanine Oleson, Samson Projects, Boston, MA

This is Our World, Savage Art Resources, Portland, OR 2002 Over the River and Through the Woods, PS122 Gallery, New York, NY

2015 We Were Singing, Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR 2014 You & I Are Earth, Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR

39

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2021 Staying with the Trouble, Curated by Kate McNamara, SMFA/Boston, Tufts University Galleries, Boston, MA (forthcoming)

Active Threads, group exhibition, KAI 10 / ARTHENA FOUNDATION, Düsseldorf, Germany

Art on Paper, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC (forthcoming) 2020 Collectivity, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX

Drawing 2020, Gladstone Gallery, New York, NY

Never Done: 100 Years of Women in Politics and Beyond, Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, NY

Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Selections from the Collection 1933-2018, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 2019 Feminist Histories: Artists After 2000, Sao Paulo Museum of Art, Brazil

Dress Codes: Ellen Lesperance and Diane Simpson, Frye Museum, Seattle, WA

Less is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design, ICA Boston, MA

40

Honolulu Biennial: To Make Wrong / Right / Now, Honolulu, HI 2018 New Materialism, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden

Nashashibi / Skaer, Tate St Ives, Cornwall, UK

Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance, Nottingham Contemporary and De La Warr Pavilion

Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection, Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY 2017 Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, New Museum, New York, NY

Makers Catalogue, Derek Eller Gallery, New York, NY

Occupation, Boston University Galleries, Boston, MA

Thread Lines, (traveling from the Drawing Center, New York, NY)

Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, KY 2016 Ellen Lesperance and Helen Mirra, Traversing, Armory Arts Center, Pasadena, CA

Who Cares?, Valerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris, France

Exploring Reality, Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

Crafting the Future, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR 2015 Book of Scores, Disjecta, Portland, OR

Take Back Vermont, Zieher, Smith & Horton, New York, NY

Common Thread, Mixed Greens, New York, NY

Harlem Postcards, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY 2014 Sincerely, Ambach & Rice, Los Angeles, CA

Thread Lines, The Drawing Center, New York, NY

Almost Something, Not Quite Nothing, Ambach & Rice Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

PORTLAND2014 Biennial, curated by Amanda Hunt, Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Portland, OR 2013 American Identities: A New Look, Modern Life, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR

Biennaleonline curated by Jens Hoffmann, www.artplus.com

2012 Hang Up, Josh Lilley Gallery, London, England

Dear Pippa Bacca, Frieze Frame, New York, NY

Contemporary Watercolor, Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NY

Falling Through Space, Drawing by the Line, University of Buffalo Center for the Arts, Buffalo, NY 2011 Body Gesture, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR

will be home..., Ambach & Rice Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2010-12 People’s Biennial, curated by Harrell Fletcher and Jens Hoffmann, Traveling: PICA, Portland, OR; Dahl Arts Center, Rapid City, SD; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford, PA 2010 Performance Forever,Façade/ Fasad Gallery, Brooklyn, NY 2008 The Gathering, Drawing Room, Portland, ME 2007 Mother, May I?, Campbell Soady Gallery, New York, NY

Art as Intervention, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH

41

2006-7 Cryptozoology: Out of Time Place Scale, Traveling: Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO; Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME 2006 Redykeulous, curated by Nicole Eisenman and A.L. Stein,Participant Inc., New York, NY

Bearings: The Female Figure, curated by Allen Frame, PS122 Gallery, New York, NY 2005 Something is Somewhere, Monya Rowe Gallery, New York, NY

Human Nature, Pump House Gallery, London, UK

Off the Coast: A Landscape Chronology, Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME 2004 RE:SOURCE Performances, Art in General, New York, NY

RE:SOURCE, curated by Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy, Art in General, New York, NY 2003 The Changing Same, Triple Candie, New York, NY

La Superette, Deitch Projects, NYC; Participant Inc., Brooklyn, NY

Off the Top, curated by Sid Sachs, Bill Maynes Gallery, NewYork, NY

42

Mark: Contemporary Drawings, Gallery 16, San Francisco, CA

Portland Biennial, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME 2002 Inside Out, The Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL 2001 Fully Human, The Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY

Domestic Culture: The Home in Visual Culture, curated by Mark Bessire, Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, ME 2000 Deterritorialization of Process, curated by Michael Joo, Artists Space, New York, NY

In Its Own Way, curated by Joan Linder, Makor Gallery, New York, NY

7,840,800 CU FT, Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, Queens, NY 1999 Lesperance’s Hand-Knit Self Portrait, Printed Matter, Inc., New York, NY 1996 Project Room, Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle, WA

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

EDUCATION 1999 Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, MFA, New Brunswick, NJ 1999 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME 1995 BFA University of Washington, Seattle, WA, US GRANTS, AWARDS & RESIDENCIES 2020 Frederick Hammersley Artist Residency, Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, New Mexico

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in Fine Arts, New York, NY 2018 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, New York, NY 2017 Macdowell Colony Artist’s Residency, Peterborough, NH

Chiaro Award, Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA 2014 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York, NY

Djerassi Artists Residency, Bear Gulch, CA

Individual Artist Fellowship, Oregon Arts Commission, Salem, OR

2012 Hallie Ford Foundation Fellow, The Ford Family Foundation, Roseburg, OR 2010 Betty Bowen Award, Seattle, WA

MacDowell Colony Artist-In-Residence, Interdisciplinary / Performance, Peterborough, NH 2005 LEF Foundation Grant, New England Division, Boston, MA 2003 Associate Artist, “First Contact: Photographers Explore the Florida Landscape,” The Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL 2001 Faculty Development Grant, Maine College of Art, Portland, ME

Course Work, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, ME 2000 Project Honorarium, Artists Space, New York, NY 1999 Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Grant, Morristown, NJ 1998 Artist-in-Residence, Studios Midwest, Galesburg, IL 1996 Artist-in-Residence, Pratt Fine Arts Center, Seattle, WA

43

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD

Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY

Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY

Frye Museum, Seattle, WA

ICA Miami, Miami, FL

Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX

Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA

Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR

Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA

Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR

The Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY

University of Oregon, Eugene, OR

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

BIBLIOGRAPHY 2020 R.H. Lossin, Ellen Lesperance’s “Together we lie in ditches and in front of machines”, art-agenda, November 10

Suzy Kopf, “Seeking Out Imperfection with Ellen Lesperance”, Bmore Magazine, April 8

Elizabeth Buhe, “Ellen Lesperance, Velvet Fist”, The Brooklyn Rail, March

Sarah Cascone, “Here are 21 Highly Anticipated, Mind-Expanding Museum Exhibitions…”, Artnet, January 6 2019 Jenelle Porter, “Less is a Bore: Maximilist Art & Design”, The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston 2018 Wendy Vogel, “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY, exhibition review, Mousse magazine, January

Claire Lehman, “Ellen Lesperance at Derek Eller Gallery”, Artforum, December

Arthur Ivan Bravo, “Ellen Lesperance at Derek Eller Gallery”, Artillery, November 6

Hovey Brock, “Ellen Lesperance, Lily of the Arc Lights”, The Brooklyn Rail, October 15

Jillian Steinhauer, “Ellen Lesperance at Derek Eller Gallery”, The New York Times, September 20

Johanna Fateman, “Ellen Lesperance at Derek Eller Gallery”, The New Yorker, September 24 2017 Holland Cotter, “When it

44

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

Comes to Gender, Let Confusion Reign”, exhibition review, The New York Times, September 28

Jerry Saltz, “The New Museum’s ‘Trigger’ is Radical in content: Retrograde in FormL What Should we Make of That?, exhibition review, New York Magazine, October 23

Andrea K. Scott, “Makers Catalogue”, exhibition review, The New Yorker, August 4

Ellen Lesperance: Congratulations and Celebrations”, portfolio feature, Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Vol. 44, #6

Jennifer Kabat, “Yearly Round-Up: Congratulations and Celebrations,” exhibition review, Frieze magazine, January

Jennifer Kabat, “Pattern Recognition”, Frieze, September

Wendy Vogel, “W.I.T.C.H. Way”, Artforum, August 22

John Dorfman, “Get in Line”, Art and Antiques, December

Karen Rosenberg, “Thread Lines”, The New York Times, October 17

Joanna Kleinberg Romanow, “Thread Lines,” Drawing Papers #118, The Drawing Center, New York, NY

Ellen Langner, “PDX Road Trip”, New American Paintings, March 25

2016 Karen Rosenberg, “Knit, Purl, Protest: The Radical Feminist Stitchcraft of Ellen Lesperance, Artspace, JanuarySharon Mizota, “Review for Ellen Lesperance and Helen Mirra”, L.A. Times, June 27

Photo Credits Photos on pages 6,14,15,16,17,18,19 Courtesy Nick Griffith Photo on page 20 (top) Courtesy Ellen Lesperance Photo on page 38 Courtesy Rose Dickson

2013 Vitamin D2: New Perspectives in Drawing, Phaidon Press 2012 Becky Poostchi, “This Sweater’s Better”, Garage, Spring/ Summer 2012 2011 Harrell Fletcher, Jens Hoffmann, and Renaud Proch, “People’s Biennial: A Guide to America’s Most Amazing Artists, Independent Curators International

2015 Joey Frank, “Ellen Lesperance”, Intercourse Magazine, Issue 4, Winter

Ashley Stull Meyers, “Ellen Lesperance: We Were Singing, at Adams and Ollman, Daily Serving, September 29

Juliana Halpert, “Common Thread”, Artforum, August 14 2014 Sue Taylor, “Ellen Lesperance, Portland, at Adams and Ollman”, Art in America, December

45

Frederick Hammersley (1919-2009) spent most of his formative years, time as a student, and early career in California, where he garnered a reputation as an important abstract painter in the west coast scene and began a prominent career in geometric hard-edge painting in the late 1950s. In 1949-50, he taught himself lithography and produced an innovative group of prints through which he systematically explored the properties and interactions of color, line, value, and texture on various papers and even fabric. In 1968, Hammersley moved to Albuquerque and accepted a teaching appointment at the University of New Mexico. During this time, he was introduced to Art1, a newly developed computer program that enabled artists to create artworks using a mainframe machine and line printer. The computer drawings he made, which he sometimes called prints, are some of the earliest instances of computer art. Hammersley resigned from teaching in 1971 but continued to live and work in Albuquerque, receiving a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973 and NEA grants in 1975 and 1977. He continued to paint, draw, and make prints, including a number of lithographs at Tamarind, until his death in 2009.

In 2016, the Frederick Hammersley Foundation initiated the Frederick Hammersley Artist Residency and the Frederick Hammersley Apprentice Printer programs at Tamarind as part of the foundation’s mission to expand the public’s awareness of Hammersley’s art and life, promote the value of art in the life of the community, and support the advancement of artists’ education and creative processes through funding for research and scholarships for art students and other practitioners of the arts.

Right: Photograph by Dan Barsotti.

Courtesy Frederick Hammersley Foundation.

46

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

47

Tamarind Institute. Photo by Robert Reck, courtesy DNCA Architects.

Tamarind Institute Since 1960, Tamarind has shaped the field of collaborative printmaking, through a unique printer training program and an educational mission to preserve

48

and advance the creative medium of lithography. Today Tamarind is a nonprofit workshop occupying a freestanding building on the original Route 66, with a state-ofthe-art workshop, public gallery, and regular public programs and tours. Tamarind encompasses

ELLEN LESPERANCE AT TAMARIND I N S T I T U T E

an extensive archive of historic material, a vast print inventory of 8000 lithographs produced by the workshop, and a team of highly trained printers, curators, and print experts. Tamarind Institute stimulates research, preservation of knowledge, and community

among a diverse international following. This unique program is widely credited with revitalizing the creative medium of lithography and continues to provide the only printer training program of its kind in the world.

49