(Images taken from the Tang Museum’s website)
This past Saturday, The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College launched its spring season with the opening of Mary Weatherford’s new exhibit Canyon-Daisy-Eden. The event featured a collection of her work spanning thirty years, as well as a talk with the artist herself.
The Tang was packed with students, faculty, local art-lovers, and Weatherford’s friends and collaborators, so much so that there weren’t enough seats for everyone. The talk began at 4 p.m. and lasted just under an hour, with discussion and Q&A facilitated by Ian Berry, the Tang’s Dayton Director, and Bill Arning, an independent curator and longtime friend of Weatherford. Berry and Arning curated this exhibit for the Tang, and in October it will travel to the SITE museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
From large target paintings she made in the late 1980s titled Nagasaki, to images of covered women, to interpretive cave drawings, to colossal abstract paintings paired with jarring neon lines, Weatherford’s hugely various artwork covered the walls of the gallery as we walked through a not-quite-chronological display of her life’s work thus far. We saw the different phases of this artist’s career and were able to identify motifs that continue to intrigue her.
Many of the chosen works on display come from her own personal collection of her artwork that has never before been seen by the public. This exhibit is vast, powerful, and incredibly personal.
Location has shaped Weatherford’s art throughout her life. Originally from Ojai, California, the artist takes us through a cross-country journey in which her styles and perspectives constantly change. As we can see in the selected works, there were times in her life when nature captivated her more than the human form, and vice versa.
The name of the exhibit comes from the titles of three of her paintings: Canyon, Daisy, and Eden. Individually, these works have their own identities, but together, they form a new collective one.
Weatherford told her captivated audience about the importance of language in her work. Every painting has a carefully selected title, and many are named after important people in her life. She stated that one of her cave paintings, Georgia, is at once an homage to a friend of hers who died, Georgia O'Keeffe, and essentially a “memorial for people named Georgia.” She also mentioned that her late sister is named Margaret, and three of her paintings on display contain the word “Margaret” in their title.
Some linguistic connections are slightly more abstract. She spoke at length about the connections she strives to make through art and the extensive research that goes into it. Both paintings titled Nagaski are inspired by the opera Madama Butterfly, which is set in Nagasaki, Japan. The titular female protagonist dies a tragic death after a man leaves her for another woman. Weatherford noticed the circular timelines of women in folklore sacrificing themselves for the sake of men they love. She connected this to rings on trees, and how their history wraps around them.
As an artist, Weatherford is captivated by female representation and regaining control of the image of women. She’s explored the symbolism of blind women in pieces like Night and Day and Big Red Margaret Head. She has also explored and critiqued the “tragic women” trope that has dominated popular culture for generations.
Weatherford often connects her work to her scholarly interests, which include “history, reading, science, music, geography” as well as other forms of art, such as ballet and opera. She bridges art, pop-culture, literature, and her own life experiences. The organization of the exhibition mimics this, as pieces are not organized chronologically, and there is an invitation for viewers to look across and through the space to connect the pieces.
It was slightly ironic, that despite this, her male curators and colleagues who co-hosted the discussion often spoke over Weatherford or attempted to explain her work. Before even being properly introduced, she was already having her image as an artist questioned. They would explain the themes and meanings of her pieces, and she would eloquently correct them afterwards.
The Tang wants to continue its “tradition of showcasing career-spanning surveys of important women artists,” but it is important that curators who are attempting to be more representative of women in the male-dominated fine art scene know that simply displaying female artists is not enough. Allowing them to define themselves and their artwork is just as crucial.
This engaging artist talk was the first of the semester at the Tang, and it sets the tone for more exciting things to come in the next few months.
Canyon-Daisy-Eden will be on display in the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery until July 12, 2020. It will be displayed at the SITE Sante Fe in New Mexico, and be displayed there from Oct. 16, 2020 to Feb. 8, 2021.
