207 Front Street
South Street Seaport
New York City

Visiting Hours: Wednesday-Sunday 12-6:30 pm

I am delighted to announce my participation in The Golden Thread 2: A Fiber Arts Exhibition. I will present works from my new Tea Towel Series. These pieces expand on the technique of embellishing domestic textiles that I developed in the seventies. I intervene into vintage calendar tea towels, cutting, reconfiguring, and elaborating them with needlework and acrylic paint to produce dense, richly colorful compositions. As I work, the pieces take on a life of their own, expanding organically into asymmetrical configurations.

This fiber arts exhibition reprises last spring’s exhibition with 60 new artists, including ten new site-specific installations. The exhibition will once again take place at 207 Front Street, a historic mercantile building in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport built in the 1790’s.

For more information about last year’s Golden Thread, read this article in Hyperallergic or this New York Times review.

This years artists include:

Liv Aanrud Alissa Alfonso Abdolreza Aminlari Paolo Arao Natalie Baxter Felix Beaudry Sammy Bennett Montrel Beverly Samantha Bittman Julia Bland Jess Blaustein Chris Bogia Eileen Braun Jennifer Cecere Ruby Chishti Poppy Deltadawn Rima Day Sam Dienst Lesley Dill Ali Dipp Lucia Engstrom Mark Fleuridor Terri Friedman Manuela Gonzalez Tali Halpern Sharon Kerry-Harlan Valerie Hegarty Ana María Hernando Candace Hicks Patrick Dean Hubbell Traci Johnson Anna Kunz Lauren Luloff Karen Margolis Ruben Marroquin Caitlin McCormack Lior Modan Tomo Mori Ellie Murphy Tura Oliveira Sheila Pepe Julie Peppito Debra Rapoport Josie Love Roebuck Baylee Schmitt Sylvia Schwartz Michelle Segre Manju Shandler Fran Siegel Emily Silver Jacqueline Surdell Rhian Swierat Suzanne Tick Trish Tillman Tiny Pricks Project (Diana Weymar) Maris Van Vlack Cyle Warner Rachel Mica Weiss Ulla-Stina Wikander Halley Zien

I look forward to seeing you there!

The post Jennifer Cecere in The Golden Thread 2 appeared first on Jennifer Cecere.

The great wave of Italian immigration took place in the closing years of the nineteenth century and early into the twentieth. Most of the arrivals were Southern Italians who set foot on Ellis Island with few belongings but with the ingenuity, creativity, and will to make a new life. Using their skills in carpentry, stonework, farming, mechanics, tailoring, needlework, and cooking, they created homes and communities that flourished and grew. Most remained in the Northeast within a day’s drive of where they landed.

The tradition of creativity and handwork continues in the studios of their children and grandchildren. Painters and sculptors, printmakers and textile artists, they draw from the richness of Italian and Italian-American culture, some producing work that speaks to tradition, others working more abstractly but personally informed by the language and customs that were, and are, so much a part of their lives. A few of the artists are immigrants themselves. All of them synthesize Italian or immigrant culture with their experience as trained artists working in a contemporary art world.

The 26 participating artists include B. Amore, John Avelluto, Nancy Azara, Angelica Bergamini, Gianluca Bianchino, Jennifer Cecere, Chris Costan, Elisa D’Arrigo, Claudia DeMonte, Paul Fabozzi, Milisa Galazzi, Diana González Gandolfi, D. Dominick Lombardi, Lloyd (Maccarone) Martin, Joanne Mattera, Timothy (Macellari) McDowell, Patricia Miranda, John Monti, Laura (Policella/Roccio) Moriarty, Carolanna Parlato, Anna Patalano, Don Porcaro, Mary Schiliro, Karen Schifano, Denise Sfraga, and Lisa Zukowski.

“At a time when ethnicity and cultural legacy are topics of discussion in the art world as well as in society at large, A Legacy of Making contributes to the conversation with art and stories that express the immigrant experience as filtered through American lives,” says Joanne Mattera, curator of the exhibition.

A Legacy of Making: 26 Contemporary Artists Inspired by Their Italian Heritage

September 3-October 19, 2024
Cummings Art Center, Connecticut College
270 Mohegan Avenue, New London

Receptions: Saturday, September 14, 2:00-5:30, and Saturday, October 19, 4:00-5:30
The gallery is open Monday-Friday, 9:00-5:00; Saturday and Sunday, 1:00-4:00
(Closed for fall break, October 5-8)

Additional info: https://www.conncoll.edu/arts-culture/art-art-history-architectural-studies/art-exhibitions/ 860-439-2740

The post A Legacy of Making: 26 Contemporary Artists Inspired by Their Italian Heritage appeared first on Jennifer Cecere.

In conjunction with the 50th anniversary of Abbot Academy and Phillips Academy becoming a single institution, Jennifer Cecere has created two site-specific installations. Referencing and recontextualizing the humble lace ornament, an oversized and reflective doily adorns the Addison’s façade, while one of the artist’s signature doily benches enlivens Abbot Circle.

Generous support for this installation is provided by the Abbot Academy Fund, continuing Abbot’s tradition of boldness, innovation, and caring.

MAY 22 @ 3PM – FREE!
Register Here

Learn more about the residency & exhibition »

The post May 22: Virtual Talk @ Addison Gallery of American Art appeared first on Jennifer Cecere.

The post Public Art Commission: Spring 2024 appeared first on Jennifer Cecere.

Several of Jennifer’s works are included in the Addison Gallery’s latest exhibition, Women and Abstraction.

“By championing women’s work and making it more visible, I hope to open people’s minds – to change the way people think about what art is and what it can be. I’m thrilled to be showing for the first time these five colored pencil drawings of my sculptures from 1979-80 in Women and Abstraction 1741-Now, curated by Gordon Wilkins, at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Ma, through July 30, 2023.”

View the exhibit press release | Visit the Addison Gallery website

The important work done over the past decades to illuminate the contributions of historically marginalized and overlooked women has largely concentrated on white painters associated with the postwar, 20th-century New York school’s abstract expressionism. While Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and others among their contemporaries have rightfully been ensconced in the pantheon of great American abstract artists, many more—from all periods—remain neglected by scholars and museums alike. This exhibition proposes a different way of looking at abstraction in American art. 

Drawn almost entirely from the permanent collection, Women and Abstraction: 1741–Now is not a comprehensive survey. Instead, this installation takes advantage of the Addison’s deep holdings to explore a more nuanced and expansive history of the development of abstraction in America. Through the inclusion of works created hundreds of years before the advent of abstract expressionism as well as objects historically denied the status of fine art, this exhibition explores how women have deployed the visual language and universal formal concerns of abstraction—color, line, form, shape, contrast, pattern, and texture—to create works of art across a wide variety of media (including painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, ceramics, and textiles) from the 18th century to the present day. Rejecting chronology, hierarchies of medium, and the restrictive definitions of art movements, Women and Abstraction invites the viewer to draw aesthetic connections across seemingly disparate objects, complicating ingrained notions of what abstraction is and is not.

The post Women and Abstraction: 1741 – Now at the Addison Gallery of American Art appeared first on Jennifer Cecere.

The post Unexpected Art appeared first on Jennifer Cecere.

Curators
Franck Gautherot and Seungduk Kim, co-directors of the Consortium Museum, Dijon in collaboration with Lionel Bovier, director of the MAMCO, Geneva

Artists
LYNDA BENGLIS, CYNTHIA CARLSON, JENNIFER CECERE, MARC CAMILLE CHAIMOWICZ, BRAD DAVIS, TINA GIROUARD, SIMON HANTAÏ, VALERIE JAUDON, RICHARD KALINA, JOYCE KOZLOFF, ROBERT KUSHNER, THOMAS LANIGAN-SCHMIDT,
ALVIN D. LOVING, KIM MACCONNEL, RODNEY RIPPS, TONY ROBBIN, MIRIAM SCHAPIRO, ALAN SHIELDS, NED SMYTH, GEORGE SUGARMAN, CLAUDE VIALLAT, BETTY WOODMAN, GEORGE WOODMAN, MARIO YRISARRY, ROBERT ZAKANITCH, JOE ZUCKER.

Video director
Stef Bloch

Video assistant
Lucie Roble

Music
Pattern by Hoplite

“By bringing these artists together, this exhibition shows these different aspects through significant work by each artist. Beyond the pattern, it also reveals the place of the object via the works of Jennifer Cecere and Betty Woodman, whose ceramics are associated with a style of painting rich in decorative forms and a Matisse-like palette”

– Romain Mathieu, Pattern Decoration and Crafts, art press 462

Press Clips:

• “Weird and Fantastic Modern Art in Dijon’s Consortium” in National Review, 9/7/2019
• “The Under-the-Radar French Museum That Quietly Predicts Art’s Next Big Thing” in The New York Times, 6/21/2016 

More About the Exhibition:

This exhibition is a joint collaboration with Lionel Bovier and the MAMCO in Geneva, where it was presented from Oct. 10, 2018 to Feb. 03, 2019.

Pattern, Crime & Decoration features the groundbreaking, artist-led American art movement Pattern & Decoration, which started in the mid-1970s and lasted until the mid-1980s. Often viewed as the last organized art movement of the 20th century, it chronologically straddles the end of modernism and the beginning of postmodernism, through its rejection of the rigid tenets of formalism and its embrace of decorative motifs and non-Western visual forms. Strongly grounded in feminism, it included many women artists and sought to highlight some kinds of arts and crafts often dismissed as belonging to the domestic or decorative sphere such as tapestry, quilting, wallpaper or embroidery.

Against the purist, prescriptive background of the dominant art forms of their time such as Minimalism and Conceptualism, Pattern & Decoration signaled the end of the reductivist arc of formalist modernism and the beginning of a new era, by freely and subversively borrowing from the formal vocabulary of Islamic art, Mexican and Indian cultures, or Roman and Byzantine mosaics, diverting the rigidity of the minimalist grid to create repeated patterns that boldly emphasized figurative tropes, bright colors, flowering outlines and arabesques. The movement, gathered around the writings of art critic Amy Goldin (1926-1978), was supported by art dealers Holly Solomon in New York and Bruno Bischofberger in Switzerland. Although Pattern & Decoration was critically and commercially successful at its inception, it faded from view after the 1980s.

In retrospect, it can now be viewed as a forerunner for many art currents that followed, with its use of deconstructed, loose shapes, interest in non-Western art, dazzling colors and mixed patterns used to reject the patriarchal, Eurocentric framework of modernism as embodied in Adolf Loos’s 1910 essay Ornament and Crime.

In this exhibition at the Consortium Museum, artists from the Pattern & Decoration movement are presented alongside forerunners like George Sugarman (1912-1999), an artist best-known for his colorful sculptures that at the time of their making escaped all categorization, “neither Pop nor Minimal” but were rather “maximalists” and which, in their refusal to conform to a prevailing type of art in the 1960s and 1970s anticipated the state of mind at the root of the Pattern & Decoration movement; as well as American and European artists from the same era whose work shares similar formal concerns, such as Lynda Benglis, Alan Shields, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Claude Viallat or Simon Hantaï.

Artworks by Valerie Jaudon (b. 1945), Tony Robbin (b. 1943), Joyce Kozloff (b. 1942), Simon Hantaï (1922-2008), Joe Zucker (b. 1941), Mario Yrisarry (b. 1933), George Woodman (1932-2017) and Richard Kalina (b. 1946) examine the function of patterns in their repetition, deviations and repartition on a grid, which builds on the same formal organization principles as Minimalism but depart from the latter’s austere theoretical severity by following the influence of Non-Western arts and most specifically textile arts.

Pieces by Miriam Schapiro (1923-2015), Cynthia Carlson (b. 1942), Tina Girouard (b. 1946), Alan Shields (1944-2005), Robert Zakanitch (b. 1935), Claude Viallat (b. 1936) and Alvin D. Loving (1935-2005) share a common ground when recalling or being obviously inspired by quilting techniques––a traditional kind of vernacular, feminine craft—or by embroidery and sewing, and challenge formal considerations associated with modernism such as the flatness of painting by producing hybrid creations: cut-out backgrounds, fabrics hanging from the ceiling, and visual disruptions by juxtaposing various patterns. 

Other works display exuberant colors and formal compositions, whose exploration of decorative motifs recalls the importance of Henri Matisse and most specifically his famed paper cutouts, with Robert Kushner (b. 1949), Kim MacConnel (b. 1946), Betty Woodman (b. 1930), Brad Davis (b. 1942) and Marc Camille Chaimowicz (b. 1947) whose more recent work reactivates the legacy of Pattern & Decoration within the exhibition.

Other artworks are marked by opulence, baroque, glitter, and immersive spaces with Rodney Ripps (b. 1950), Ned Smyth (b. 1948), Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt (b. 1948), Lynda Benglis (b. 1941) and Jennifer Cecere (b. 1950), with lush installations and pieces displaying colorful, ethereal fabrics and objects based on elements such as dollies and fans covered with ornamental motifs and patterns in saturated colors.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive catalog with previously unpublished archival material.

The post Pattern, Decoration & Crime appeared first on Jennifer Cecere.

Alanna Heiss and the Institute for Art and Urban Resources purchased PS1, an abandoned school building from NYC for a dollar. When it reopened in 1976, artists were invited to transform the building’s spaces, stairwells, bathrooms and classrooms.

In 1979, PS1 invited me to transform a former classroom.

Unheard of today. I was given free reign and three weeks to do whatever I wanted in room 206.

I made sculptures out of lace, doilies, and acrylic paint which resembled domestic furnishings, sofa chairs, rugs, screens and curtains which I hung in the drafty windows.  

“In My Room,” the first of many installations, prefigured my later Public Art, also inspired by domesticity, benches, chandeliers, antimacassars sometimes painted on jersey barriers, along highways or strung in trees.

As one critic put it: “No sternly minimal intellectual pretensions here.” (Amei Wallach, Newsday)

I painted the floor pink and tiled it with tin squares, adding gel-thickened squiggles as a comment on the minimalist fashion of the day.

The blackboard became a “quilt.” Windows appeared on the walls, complete with tables and views.  

My approach was unapologetically female and domestic, I embraced the opportunity armed with women’s work, lace, doilies and gel-thickened paint. These same materials continue to inform and inspire me today.

Although I was exhausted and sick by the opening (there was no heat in the building), my work found attention for the first time.

Well-known collectors Don & Mera Rubell bought two pieces, and unexpectedly, I found myself fielding numerous gallery and exhibition offers.

Robert Freidus became my dealer and my artwork was published (another first) in Ornamentalism by Robert Jensen & Patricia Conway, 1982. This book placed my work in a context that would be revisited 40 years later in another exhibit and book, Pattern, Crime & Decoration (2021).

 Like magic, now 41 years later, unseen installation photos were published for the first time by MOMA/PS1.

It is so thrilling to see these black and white prints, and to remember those salad days as a young artist.

What a gift!

The post From the MOMA Archives: In My Room appeared first on Jennifer Cecere.