NW women artists – Show of Hands | Another Bouncing Ball

Because the past is a sealed world, what we know of it we’ve replanted in our own soil and viewed through our own strange light. Canvases rolled up and left in the attic or discarded by relatives hoping to forget the dead are lost. What of the loyal who guard their own family’s past? Sentimental attachments do not long survive each generation’s efforts to define itself. In a capitalist country, an artwork’s only hope is to have attracted monetary value, but even the cash-worthy have a tough time avoiding time’s edit.

When photographs fade, paintings crack and sculptures crumble, the living give up on them. Exceptions are artworks stored in museums. There they’ll remain till they go out of fashion and can be later lost (deaccessioned) in a larger forgetting.

Enter art historians. Although the Northwest has had few, one of the best is currently alive: David Martin of the Martin-Zambito Gallery, specializing in American art from the 19th century to the 1940s, with a focus on the Northwest.

Whatcom Museum senior curator Barbara Matilsky wisely consulted him for her Show of Hands: Northwest Women Artists 1880-2010, which is why the exhibit’s early years are so compelling.

Compelling but disjointed. There is no way to create a narrative that spans 130 years of Northwest art. The picked-over past remains remote, and the present top heavy. If this exhibit were an essay, its lack of transitions would cause it to crumble.

Part of my reaction can be attributed to my mistake on the entry path. Instead of turning left along the corridor along a series of Margie Livingston‘s whorls of paint and Victoria Haven’s wall painting, I turned right from Livingston and Haven and dumped myself into the exhibit’s endpoint, in the past.

Livingston, Lacey Yellow Loops, 2009
Acrylic
12 x 15.25 inches

Victoria Haven, Site-specific wall painting for the Whatcom Museum, 2010
(Unlike many artists devoted to geometries, Haven never slips into formula.)

The clean lines and rigorously pale tonalities of Louise Crow‘s Eagle Dance at San Ildefonso, 1919, softened the fall. This painting was a tiny step from a dumpster till rescued at the very last minute.

Seattle has the Northwest School, reduced in many minds to Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Guy Anderson and Kenneth Callahan. Vancouver has Emily Carr. The world keeps Tobey and Graves alive, while the Northwest continues to support the remaining three.

Emily M. Carr (1871-1945)
Untitled, c. 1920
Oil on composition board
12 15/16 x 16 in. (board)
Henry Art Gallery, gift of Mrs. Viola Patterson

Helen Loggie was a briliant printmaker, attracted to nothing but trees.

Loggie, King Goblin, 1939

The 1940s through the 1980s look pretty good, with Helmi, Maude Kerns, Margaret Tomkins, Sally Haley, Patti Warashina, Mary Henry, Doris Chase, Karin Helmich, Gwen Knight, Norie Sato, Fay Jones and Elizabeth Sandvig.

Sandvig, Broken Columns, early 1970s

Working off Kandinsky, Leo Kenny is much better than Maude Kerns. While he trusted his forms, she cluttered up her background, but, hey, this show is girls-only. (In a Northwest art exhibit spanning 130 years that wants to rescue some of the forgotten, picking only women makes as much sense as picking only the left-handed. Everybody’s forgotten.)

Which brings us to the unruly present. Operating under the bloom-where-you’re-planted rule, Matilsky probably felt she had to include local fave Susan Bennerstrom, but, like Seattle’s Kathleen Gemberling Adkison, Bennerstrom is a dead spot where the ball won’t bounce. There are better choices close to the WA/B.C. divide, such as Jasmine Valandani.

Sheila Klein, however, is a fine choice. Stand, 2000

South of Seattle, so is Gail Tremblay. An Iroquois Dreams That the Tribes of the Middle East Will Take the Message of Deganawida to Heart and Make Peace, 2009

Even so, Seattle dominates the present, which didn’t have to happen. No exhibit is fair. We seek them out not for justice but for impact. On that latter score, this one suceeds.