Curated exhibitions at art fairs have become fairly ubiquitous attempts at keeping presentations fresh, and the Armory Show’s Modern section is now following suit. This year Pier 92 will see the debut of “Venus Drawn Out,” a show curated by Susan Harris and the Modern section’s first such exhibition.
Composed entirely of drawings by 20th-century women artists, the show will bring roughly 35 works by Anni Albers, Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, Lygia Clark, Helen Frankenthaler, Eva Hesse, Lee Krasner, Yayoi Kusama, Agnes Martin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Nancy Spero, and Hannah Wilke, among others, to the fair for its four-day run, March 6-9.
“Since the Armory is so schizophrenic and there are so many things going on simultaneously, I wanted to create a space where people could really stop and enjoy looking at the art,” Harris said. “My strategy for creating that kind of space was drawing. I love drawing and I thought that the intimacy and directness of drawing would enable people to come close and would draw people in.”
The curated work, which will be presented at four sites throughout the pier, will be delineated from the rest of the booths by eggplant-colored walls. Harris decided to source the pieces almost entirely from the galleries participating in the Modern section and nearly all of them will be for sale. “Most of the galleries that I had conversations with were very supportive of this because they’re hoping that it raises not only the visibility, but the quality of the fair,” Harris said.
The decision to showcase female artists in this exhibition could be viewed as commentary on gender imbalance in the art world — even today, museum holdings, auction records, and representation at art fairs indicate that the legacy of Modern art is still largely considered the work of a select few male artists — but Harris contends that the choice to focus on women was not a political one.
“I looked at the lists of artists. None of the galleries, it seemed to me at the time, were featuring the artists. But, buried in their artist lists, I saw some women’s names. I wasn’t thinking of this as a political statement. I just thought I wanted to do a show that I wanted to see.”
Deborah Harris, the managing director of the Modern section (no relation to Susan Harris), said the decision to focus on women arose organically. “We chose a curator first and through our discussions with Susan Harris we came up with the theme of women artists and focusing on works on paper came after that. We wanted to lend a little bit of curatorial weight to the fair and balance the commercial aspect. We reconfigured the floor plan so it allowed us more public space to do something like this.”
Deborah Harris agrees with Susan Harris that the show’s message isn’t purposefully political. “It was just a way of focusing on some artists that are generally underrepresented at the fair,” she said. “Maybe it will be the first time there are more works by women artists in an art fair than before.”
In addition to the salon style hangings, there will be three solo presentations, including a 15-foot drawing by Inka Essenhigh that was supplied by Pace Prints, a set of four drawings by Lynda Benglis from Birmingham’s Hill Gallery, and an original work produced in situ by 73-year-old New York-based artist Pat Steir, who currently has a show of paintings at Cheim and Read in Chelsea.
“The idea was to activate the pier with this project,” Susan Harris said of Steir’s drawing. “She is coming in on Sunday and working through Tuesday to do this wall drawing across these two perpendicular walls. One is 12 feet and the other is 32 feet.” Steir’s “Floating Line” drawing, which will be destroyed when the fair ends on Sunday, is located at the entrance to the Modern section adjacent to the Contemporary side.
When asked about the political implications of such a show, Steir insisted that the gender of the artists is a moot point. “It’s 2014. I don’t think that it’s political to show women artists,” she said. “I think that’s required. I’ve seen thousands of exhibitions with a hundred men and no women. So, an exhibition with a hundred women and no men must be normal. It’s normal. It’s showing people what they missed. Most of the women in the exhibition are not as famous as they should be.”
One such artist is Anni Albers (who was married to Josef Albers), whose geometric watercolor on silkscreen “Wall XI” (1984), supplied by Alan Cristea Gallery, is a standout piece in the show. “She studied weaving at the Bauhaus in 1922 because that was the only path open to her at the time,” explained Susan Harris. “She didn’t want to do weaving. She fought against the notion of weaving as being a feminine thing that people do in the home and she became one of the most, if not the most, important American textile designers.”
“In a sense,” she conceded, “everything becomes political.”
Another exemplary piece is Nancy Spero’s “F111” (1968) from Michael Rosenfeld Gallery. “She is so highly regarded by so many people, but she was so angry in her lifetime because she didn’t get the kind of recognition that she should have gotten,” Harris said. “The power of what she did is profound and will live on, but it’s shocking that her works were so difficult to sell and that they didn’t have proper representation in museum collections. That’s the case with a lot of these artists. That’s the part where I say, ‘Are we really still talking about this in 2014?’”
“You can’t help but veer of into a political conversation,” Harris added. “But the main focus is just to feature and celebrate all these amazing works of art by wonderful artists, many of whom haven’t been properly seen and valued.”
