SPOTLIGHT: VIRGINIA JARAMILLO

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1 SPOTLIGHT: VIRGINIA JARAMILLO BOOTH C52 Preview Day: Thursday 4th May 2017 Public Opening Hours: Thursday 5th May - Sunday 7th May Frieze New York Randall s Island Park, NY For enquiries and sales please contact sales@halesgallery.com New York, 64 Delancey Street, NY (646)

2 SPOTLIGHT: VIRGINIA JARAMILLO, FRIEZE NEW YORK, BOOTH C52 Hales Gallery is delighted to announce its return to Frieze New York for the fair s 2017 edition, with a revelatory presentation of American artist Virginia Jaramillo s spectacular curvilinear abstractions. Coinciding with Frieze, Jaramillo s work, including a curvilinear painting, will feature in the Brooklyn Museum s We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, Tate Modern s Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (12 July 22 October 2017, London, UK) will feature another work from the series. Painted in New York in the 1970s, these bold canvases, shown publicly at Frieze New York for the first time in over four decades, brilliantly express the creative vision of a previously underrecognised artist now receiving renewed and deserved attention. Across her rich and varied practice, Jaramillo has continually explored abstraction, rigorously experimenting with material and process to, in Jaramillo s words, translate the structure of our physical, spiritual and mental worlds through space and geometry in art. After relocating to New York from California in 1967 following the civil rights protests, Jaramillo s painting evolved in response to her new environment. Immersed in the New York arts community, working alongside figures such as Melvin Edwards, Frank Bowling and Sam Gilliam, Jaramillo embarked on her curvilinear paintings: intensely vivid fields of colour disrupted by precisely painted lines in contrasting shades that curve, divide and intersect. Originally debuted in the seminal 1971 DeLuxe Show in Houston, Texas (supported by the Menil Foundation), and in the 1972 Whitney Annual, Jaramillo s curvilinear paintings were received with critical acclaim and recognition of their significance. In a 1970 review of these works, Bowling describes them as a response to paint more physical than cerebral. Indeed, the physical materiality of her medium (in this case, paint) is central to Jaramillo s work; for these canvases, she spent many hours mixing paints to create deep colour fields in which new tones are revealed in different lights and from different angles. The resulting experience transports the viewer beyond the painted surface, evoking cosmic or metaphysical planes of existence. Virginia Jaramillo (b. 1939, El Paso, Texas) studied at Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, from Jaramillo lives and works in New York. Jaramillo s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions at prestigious institutions, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles ( ), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1972), Mexican Museum, San Francisco (1980), A.I.R. Gallery, New York (1984), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011), MoMA PS1, New York (2012), Brooklyn Museum, New York (2014, 2016) and Tate Modern, London (2016). Selected public and corporate collections include the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Richfield, Connecticut; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Mexican Museum, San Francisco; Pasadena Art Museum, California; Kemper Museum, Missouri and the Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City. New York, 64 Delancey Street, NY (646)

3 VIRGINIA JARAMILLO, Untitled, 1971, acrylic on canvas, x 183 cm, 84 1/8 x 72 1/8 in New York, 64 Delancey Street, NY (646)

4 VIRGINIA JARAMILLO, Untitled, 1971, oil on canvas, x cm, 95 7/8 x 71 7/8 in New York, 64 Delancey Street, NY (646)

5 VIRGINIA JARAMILLO, Untitled, 1973, acrylic on canvas, x cm, 72 1/8 x 72 1/8 in New York, 64 Delancey Street, NY (646)

6 Top to bottom: The Deluxe Show exhibition view, 1971; Helen Winkler, Peter Bradley, Kenneth Noland, and Clement Greenberg installing The Deluxe Show, with Virginia Jaramillo s Untitled (1971) in the background, Images cou tesy of Menil Archives, The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: Hickey-Robertson, Houston New York, 64 Delancey Street, NY (646)

7 VIRGINIA JARAMILLO Frank Bowling Art in America, Arts Magazine, November 1970, pg. 31

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9 Jonathan Griffin, Into Unpaved Territory: From hippie modernism to concrete poetry, Toby Kamps discusses his vision for Spotlight, Frieze Week companion, New York 2017

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14 Sarah Roberts, Virginia Jaramillo: Where The Heavens Touch The Earth, Twin, 19th January 2017 From today Hales Gallery will play host to Virginia Jaramillo s first solo exhibition outside of her native US. Entitled Where the Heavens Touch the Earth, the exhibition will display her work from the 1970s, which is striking in its underlying geometry. Bringing together a selection of large-scale canvases and the series Visual Theorems, the work crosses boundaries between painting and drawing, and canvas and paper, creating a tangible materiality. Virginia Jaramillo s career has spanned almost six decades. Born in El Paso, Texas, she spent her formative years in California, before living briefly in Europe and then relocating to New York City, where she still lives today. She is focused on expressing cultural constructs and sensory perceptions of space and time through her work, and draws inspiration from widely varied sources, including science fiction and Celtic and Greek mythologies. We spoke to Virginia about her work, New York in the 1970s, and her artistic influences. The name of your exhibition Where the Heavens Touch the Earth, lends itself to the notion of boundaries and transcendence. Where does this title come from and how do these themes feed into your work? The title stems directly from Teotihuacan, an ancient archeological site several miles outside present day Mexico City. Teotihuacan symbolizes and alludes to, the place where the heavens touch the earth and the place where the gods were born. This place, aligned so precisely with cardinal points and certain star systems, has played a large role in my work. Since childhood I ve been fascinated and intrigued with why people and cultures believe what they do, and how their myths of creation are transformed into truths. What happened for this belief system to take hold? How does your work play with the structural patterns we use to interpret the world and the flow of space and time? My work is an aesthetic investigation of the sensory matrix we superimpose upon our environment, our lives, and our cultural myths, so we can comprehend and survive in the world around us. I believe that the fabric of time and space is inextricably interwoven into every civilization that has ever existed. Your choice of materials has developed since your celebrated Black Paintings that were made in California. What drove your selection of medium at that time? The Black Painting period was a time of extreme financial and political hardship, socially and artistically. If I wanted to paint, I had to use any material that was readily available at our neighborhood hardware store. I began preparing my own rabbit skin glue and gesso from scratch and using cheap black and dark brown paints that I grew to love. The journey with the black paintings, which began from a period of financial need, was a blessing in disguise for me as an artist. It gave me a voice. Can you tell us about your year spent living in Europe in the 1960s, how was that formative for you? California is a very special place, and its beauty had a tremendous effect on my formative years and still feeds my sensibilities as an artist. But coming straight from California, Europe, and specifically Paris, was an eye-opener. Europe was truly an alien planet. Everywhere I walked or looked, there was a sense of the historical, and I was present and a part of it. Everything was art ; the food I ate, the shop windows, the paintings hanging in Le Louvre. It was a visual and sensory feast. After living in Europe, I never looked back. I knew I could never survive as a creative being in an art environment where so much was closed to minorities.

15 Virginia Jaramillo, Visual Theorems 12, 1980 Virginia Jaramillo, Visual Theorems 18, 1979 During your transition from West to East coast, how did your painting develop, and how did your relationship to abstraction shift? I have always been concerned with abstraction. My involvement with a particular spatial construct allows me to look beyond the literal, which the canvas creates. It becomes deep sensory space. Whilst in New York City in the 1970s and 80s, you were involved with various feminist organizations, including the celebrated Heresies Magazine and legendary A.I.R. Gallery. Can you discuss this moment for women artists and your place within it? To be honest, at the time I was not as involved as many women artists of the period. Being married to a black artist, raising two children, being a Mexican-American woman artist, and squeezing in time to do my work was difficult. Dealing with the racial bias of the time could defeat anyone. My life was a political statement. During this period I worked with the staff of Heresies Magazine for their Third World Women issue, which was very gratifying. Being on the board of advisors of The Feminist Art Institute, and helping to organize a successful benefit auction for a scholarship fund for women artists is something I m very proud of. As is being part of Women Artists of the 80 s at A.I.R. Gallery in New York City, which was curated by Corinne Robins. This will be your first solo exhibition outside of the US. What s next? I m excited to be participating in two major museum shows later in the year; We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women at The Brooklyn Museum in New York and Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at the Tate Modern. In May, Hales Gallery will feature several of my Curvilinear paintings from the 1970s in the Spotlight section of Frieze New York art fair.

16 Daisy Schofield, Interview Virginia Jaramillo, Schön!, 28 March 2017 Virginia Jaramillo s richly varied, expressive and experimental paintings reflect a fruitful career spanning over six decades. Having spent her formative years amongst a thriving community of West Coast artists, Jaramillo s painterly style is in many respects aligned with her contemporaries. However, as Jaramillo discusses in an exclusive interview with Schön!, working as a female artist in a predominantly male circle meant that asserting her artistic identity posed many a challenge. Jaramillo s monumental canvases shun traditional modes of representation in favour of a visual translation of the structural patterns we superimpose onto reality, in order to organise our experience. Her intention is to offer a new mode of perception, through straight lines, arcs and forms which organise the paintings into fields of colour. She draws these organisational systems from sources ranging from classical geometry, pre-hispanic architecture, and the ancient civilizations which built their cities and credited their very existence to beliefs, cultural myths and cosmologies in order to better understand their world. Alongside these historic sources, the rigorous order and pared down aesthetic of Jaramillo s work can also be attributed to the prevalence West Coast Minimalism. This community of Californian artists Larry Bell and Robert Irwin amongst them absorbed the New York strand of Minimalism made popular in the 1960s and 70s by the likes of Dan Flavin, Donald Judd and Carl Andre, but with a distinctly industrial approach. The main proponents of Conceptual Art when it first emerged were male: serious women artists were few, Jaramillo recalls. I remember a time when a gallery would not bother (they were too busy ) to look at your work if you were a woman; dismissing the work and the artist straight away. You could forget it all together, if you were a woman, married and a minority. Forging her artistic identity particularly as a woman was a demoralising uphill battle everyday. The strength of her determination paid off when her work was displayed at LACMA s Annual Exhibition in 1959 at age 18, under the gender-neutral title V. Jaramillo. It was a moment which filled her with the conviction to continue carving out a place for [her] self as an artist. This is precisely what Jaramillo would go on to do. Deviating from the Finish Fetish that typified the art of her Californian contemporaries with its emphasis on glossy enamels and industrial plastics Jaramillo opted for more experimental and organic surface textures. In my earliest works, I used basic household paint and commercial stains, and boiled my own gesso and rabbit-skin glue, because it was all I could afford, the artist explains. Virginia Jaramillo, Origin Legend, 1972 (Photo by Charlie Littlewoood) I was drawn to using linen fibers when I learned it was rare to use only linen as the actual artwork. Then making the sheet as thin as possible while maintaining the sheet s integrity something no-one had done before. Whilst Jaramillo s art has been primarily concerned with the interrogation of materials and systems of perception, she maintains that her personal and artistic life has been a political statement. This is partly fuelled by her Mexican-American heritage, and to living in California in the early 1960s as an interracial couple with a young family. Her experiences led to her involvement in various feminist projects, such as the Third World Women issue of Heresies journal, and working on the board of the Feminist Art institute. Jaramillo s art may not comment directly on the social and political anxieties that have shaped her life, but it s certainly perceptible in the weightiness of her dark and imposing canvases. Looking to the future, Jaramillo hopes to continue approaching her art with this same intellectual and material curiosity. Her career may not represent a linear progression as such, but there s a consistent conceptual current running from the start: my investigation into systems of perception, which I have never really abandoned, she explains. The most important lesson Jaramillo claims to have learnt as an artist? Stay true to your self. Staunchly committed to her own artistic prerogative, it s clearly a mantra that Jaramillo stands by.

17 Holland Cotter, To Be Black, Female and Fed Up With the Mainstream, New York Times, April 20, 2017 gains, including feminist gains, of the past half-century appear to be up for grabs. Whether those gains have ever not been up for grabs is a question to consider, though the show asks more specific historical ones. Such as: What did women s liberation, primarily a white, middle-class movement, have to offer African- American women in a country where, as late as the 1960s, de facto slavery still existed; a country where racism, which the movement itself shared, was soaked into the cultural fabric? Under the circumstances, to be black, female and pursuing a career in art was a radical move. The show starts in the early 1960s, with the formation in New York City of the black artists group Spiral, composed mostly of established professionals Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Hale Woodruff who debated the pros and cons, ethical and aesthetic, of putting art in the service of the civil rights movement. In all the talk, at least one political issue seems to have been passed over: the group s gender bias. Among its 15 regular members, there was only one woman, the painter Emma Amos then in her early 20s and one of Woodruff s students who would go on to make important political art. Virginia Jaramillo, Untitled, 1971 One reason for the hullabaloo around Dana Schutz s painting of the murdered Emmett Till in the current Whitney Biennial is the weakness of the work. It looks half-baked, unresolved. Like a lot of recent political art, it doesn t try for a weight suitable to, and therefore respectful of, its racially charged, morally shattering subject. The result, to use one writer s words, is a tasty abstraction designed purposefully or inadvertently to evoke an image of common oppression. Actually, those dismissive words weren t written about the Schutz painting. They were written in 1970 by the African- American critic Linda La Rue about the vaunted cross-cultural embrace of the second-wave feminist movement. The writer eyed with deep distrust the movement s assumption that it could speak with authority for all women, including black women. Ms. La Rue s words are in the catalog for the exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, at the Brooklyn Museum. And her critical perspective is one that to a large degree shapes this spare-looking show, which takes a textured view of the political past a past that is acquiring renewed weight in the immediate present when the civil rights By the time Spiral dispersed in 1965, the social mood of the country was tense. Black Power consciousness was on the rise you ll find a detailed account of its growth in the exhibition Black Power! at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and art was increasingly a vehicle for racial assertion. The multidisciplinary Black Arts Movement took form in Harlem and spread to Chicago. There it spawned a subsidiary group called AfriCobra (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) which, with its interweave of black nationalism, spirituality, free jazz and brilliantly colored patterning, had a wide, sparks-shooting embrace. Yet it attracted relatively few female participants. Two the prolific printmaker Barbara Jones-Hogu, and the fashion designer Jae Jarrell, who painted directly on her clothes are in the show. By the 1970s, feeling the pressures of racism from outside the African-American world, and the pressures of Black Power sexism within it, female artists formed their own collectives, without necessarily identifying them as feminist. One of the earliest, called Where We At, was initiated in Brooklyn in 1971 by Vivian E. Browne, Dindga McCannon and the redoubtable Faith Ringgold. After organizing what it advertised as the first Black Women s art exhibition in known history, the group turned its second show into a benefit for black unwed mothers and their children.

18 The practical generosity of that gesture said a lot about how a distinctive African-American feminism would develop. Black collectives were embedding themselves, at street level, in communities, running educational workshops, scrounging up funds for day-care centers, and making inexpensive art graphically striking posters, for example. Our struggle was primarily against racial discrimination not singularly against sexism, said the painter Kay Brown, a Where We At member. Her measured words barely hint at the hostility felt by some black artists toward a mainstream feminist movement that in their view ignored the black working-class poor and sometimes its own racism. And anger sometimes comes through in the work. It does in the fierce hilarity of a short 1971 film called Colored Spade by Betye Saar that flashes racial stereotypes at us like rapid-fire bullets, and in a funky 1973 assemblage called The Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Cocktail, by the same artist, which turns a California wine jug with a mammy image on one side and a Black Power fist on another, into a homemade bomb. As the 1970s went on, black women began to participate, with their guard always up, in feminist projects like the all-woman A.I.R. Gallery and the Heresies Collective, at least until they were reminded of their outsider status. At the same time, they found a warm welcome at Just Above Midtown, a Manhattan gallery opened by Linda Goode Bryant in 1974 to show black contemporary art. Archival material related to this remarkable space, which closed in 1986, fills one of the exhibition s several display cases and makes fascinating reading, as does a vivacious interview with Ms. Bryant by the critic Tony Whitfield reprinted in a Sourcebook that serves as an exhibition catalog. Major pieces by artists whose careers Ms. Bryant helped start and sustained Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O Grady, Howardena Pindell appear in galleries devoted to the late 1970s and 80s, when an unprecedented amount of mixing was in progress. A multiculturalist vogue brought women and African-American artists into the spotlight. In a kind of parody of tolerance, the Reagan-era culture wars attacked artists across gender and racial lines. So did the H.I.V./ AIDS epidemic. The show ends with heirs to the Just Above Midtown generation. Some of them Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems we know well. Others, like the great dancer Blondell Cummings and the Rodeo Caldonia High-Fidelity Performance Theater, we need to know more about. And the exhibition, organized by Catherine Morris of the museum s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and Rujeko Hockley, a former curator at the Brooklyn Museum now at the Whitney Museum of American Art, at least encourages us to learn. And it leads us to at least one broad conclusion: that the African-American contribution to feminism was, and is, profound. Simply to say so to make an abstract, triumphalist claim is easy, but inadequate. It fails to take the measure of lived history. The curators of We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, do better than that just by doing their homework. They let counternarrative contradictions and confused emotions stand. The only change I would make, apart from adding more artists, would be to tweak its title: I d edit it down to its opening phrase and put that in the present tense. We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, Through Sept. 17 at the Brooklyn Museum; , brooklynmuseum.org.

19 Gabrielle Schwarz, Breaking through darkness: Virginia Jaramillo s curvilinear abstractions, April 2017 of suburban L.A. The final straw was the infamous 1965 Watts Riot, which was triggered by accusations from the black community of police discrimination and brutality and lasted for 6 days, resulting in 34 deaths and over 1000 injuries as well as millions of dollars of property damage. In Jaramillo s words, [w]e were in Watts when Watts was burning. The little house behind our house caught fire. We drove out of Watts and we never went back. 2 Virginia Jaramillo, Tau Ceti, 1970 In 1967 Virginia Jaramillo arrived in New York. The 27-yearold, Texas-born artist had spent most of her life before this point in Los Angeles. She attended L.A. s Manual Arts High School, where a celebrated fine art programme provided early education for ac-claimed artists of the future, including Philip Guston, Jackson Pollock and Jaramillo s eventual husband Daniel LaRue Johnson. Next came the Otis Art Institute, also in L.A. By now Jaramillo was already getting plenty of attention for her abstract compositions, made from a mix of whichever materials she could afford to obtain, in which she was beginning to explore her enduring themes of colour, line and ways of seeing. In a recent interview, Mel Edwards, talking about the loose circle of artist friends living in California at the time, noted that Jaramil-lo was the first one of us to show at a gallery. 1 Aged just 18 in 1959, Jaramillo had one of her works selected for inclusion in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art s annual exhibition. She went on to participate in the 1960 and 1961 editions of the annual, signing her works as the gender-neutral V. Jaramillo. But by the mid-1960s Jaramillo and Johnson, now raising a young family in the neighbourhood of Watts, had had enough of the increasingly unstable and racially charged atmosphere Jaramillo and her family moved to Europe, living in Paris and travelling throughout France as well as England, Italy and Spain. She continued to paint during this time, creating a series of small abstract paintings done in oils and beeswax. These paintings primar-ily feature the same earthy palette of blacks and browns that dominated her work from the last years in California. For Jaramillo, these colours, to which she was naturally drawn (and were the only ones she could afford to buy), had initially seemed fitting because she felt that they reflected something of L.A. s painful, anger-filled environment. We didn t talk about working in black. But horrible things were happening in the Civil Rights Movement; our surroundings were not good, and in a way, the colors indicated that something was terribly wrong. 3 In Europe this was no longer the case; there, people didn t pay attention to the color of your skin 4 a liberating experience for Jaramillo, a Mexican American married to an African American. Jaramillo s dark palette began to open up. At the edges of her canvases, the black and brown textured fields would give way to glimpses of brighter colour reds and oranges from much earlier work reappeared. This subtle shift, like Jaramillo s home in Europe, proved to be temporary. Before long Jaramillo now living permanently in New York and working from a bigger studio on Soho s buzzing Spring Street would embark on a period of creative experimentation resulting in a body of work quite distinct from what had come previously, in terms of scale, colour and emotion. Using acrylic paint now instead of oils, Jaramillo would mix multiple shades together to create a single colour, which she would paint flatly onto large square and rectangular canvases. In many works, a dark background continued to dominate. However, disrupting the concrete fields of colour, Jaramillo would add curving and intersecting lines in a wide variety of the brightest of shades. The composition of these lines would initially be worked out on paper in sketches and drawings and then enlarged on sheets of tracing paper, before being transferred with mathematical precision onto the painted surface. Initially, in works from , these lines were used to divide the canvas into different coloured fields. Gradually, however, the multiple background colours were stripped away; by 1970 nearly all of the compositions were reduced to a single

20 monochromatic flat field of paint cut through with razor-thin, vividly coloured curved lines. The resulting paintings represent a stark change from the dark, textured surfaces and imprecise lines of Jaramillo s earlier work. The desired effect of the new works was one of extreme contrast Jaramillo has described the process as trying to play positives and negatives against each other ; consequently, the surface color against the line vibrates... it comes alive. 5 In this invocation of charged elements and vibrating lines, there is the sense that for Jaramillo these new paintings represented an important discovery, not just of a different way to paint within the boundaries of the canvas, but of an actual source of illuminating electric energy. In the 1973 painting Morning Becomes Electra, a square black canvas is framed by two vertical curved lines, one green and one blue, snaking down the edges. The work s title refers to Eugene O Neill s 1931 dramatic cycle Mourning Becomes Electra, a play on words invoking what Jaramillo has poetically described as the electric moment when the sun breaks through darkness. 6 The same description could be applied to Jaramillo s own artistic development, as she channelled the creative energy of her new environment in New York into these electrically bright lines. Meanwhile, in other works such as the 1970 Green Dawn (another evocation of mornings and new days) darkness is banished completely. The canvas is painted a bright, fresh field of green, one corner marked off by a curved yellow line. When fellow painter Frank Bowling visited Jaramillo s studio, he was particularly struck by this work. Writing in the November 1970 issue of Arts Magazine, Bowling described the painting as a field of green charged with a lightening whip of acrid lemon yellow line, undulating across the top right hand corner of the painting with no apparent purpose except dynamite. 7 Once more, the curved lines are imbued with an active, electric force. Another of Jaramillo s curvilinear abstractions, a 1971 painting entitled Green Dawn 3 composed of a green line against a purple background, made a high-profile appearance two years later in the Whitney Museum of American Art s 1972 Annual. Green Dawn 3 constituted the third panel in a four-part composition at the exhibition s entrance, alongside abstractions by Cy Twombly, Larry Poons and Nancy Graves. The symbolic weight of this presentation is clear; as Carter Ratcliff wrote in a review published at the time, Jaramillo, the fresh rookie, stands for the unknown quantities intended to give this show its real buzz. 8 That Jaramillo had been making and exhibiting work in museum shows for over a decade was irrelevant. Her curvilinear abstractions felt and looked like a fresh discovery and for Jaramillo they really were: an electric moment of light breaking through darkness. In the series of developments that took place in these early years of Jaramillo s career, we can begin to sense the profound importance to her art of the concept (and realities) of place. On one level, it is possible to trace the way in which her physical environment has impacted her creative output: practical developments such as changes in what materials become available, as well as shifts in emotional atmosphere. Simultaneously, as a closer look at some of her curvilinear abstractions will hopefully make clear, Jaramillo s works can themselves be understood as quasi-minimalist explorations of the same notion: thinking about how we experience the world around us through the creation of her own worlds of pure colour and form. A year before the Whitney Annual, the 1970 Green Dawn was included, alongside another untitled curvilinear composition, in a landmark exhibition of contemporary abstraction: The De- Luxe Show. The 1971 exhibition was ground-breaking in several important ways, most notably in that curator Peter Bradley chose to exhibit abstract work by the most prominent artists of the time regard-less of their race or ethnicity, making this one of the first integrated exhibitions America had seen. Bradley also decided to hold the show in a disused movie theatre in a poor and predominantly black neighbourhood in Houston, Texas, rather than New York, where many of the exhibited artists (Anthony Caro, Al Loving, Jules Olitski and Larry Poons, amongst others) were based. More subtle but no less significant was the decision to focus on what Bradley called hard art, that is, non-representational painting, at a time when non-white artists were expected to be making explicitly political, representational work. Prior to this exhibition, there had Virginia Jaramillo, Untitled, 1973

21 been little room for the possibility that non-white artists and audiences might identify with or wish to experience hard art, or have anything to say about abstract preoccupations such as colour and form. In his excellent analysis of the exhibition, Darby English writes that [a]mong the most salient images DeLuxe throws up is that of a spatially expansive nucleus of turbulent color opened in the midst of a politically monochromatic territory. 9 Within the exhibi-tion s context, the nonrepresentational approach of the color paintings, as he calls them, comes to bear a radical potential: The works invited a disposition toward art that was radical by the representational standard urged upon children of the ghetto: in the moment, such art says that other things and experiences can constitute significant space. The moment frees the subject not merely from fixated interest in her own experience by drawing her toward the object she thus wholly attends. It also opens her to that dimension of her experience which originates in its recognition by another. 10 As abstract compositions, the works in the DeLuxe show create space not through representation or threedimensional form but through pure colour and line. By inviting the viewer to enter and experience these spaces, they affirm the notion of a decen-tred subject, whose experience and perception of the world is shown to be far more contingent, and fluid, than that insisted on by the representational standard urged upon children of the ghetto. While never stated in explicitly political terms, it is precisely this question of how we experience space as embodied, situated subjects that Jaramillo has cited as the driving force behind over half a century of abstraction: Our sensory system is constructed and organized in a way which enables us to perceive what is termed threedimensional time and space. The ongoing interaction of time and space constantly challenges our mind, continuously straining the limits of our sense of what we perceive testing the very fabric and nature of the concepts by which we structure our physical, spiritual and mental world. My work is an aesthetic investigation which seeks to translate into visual terms the mental and structural patterns we all superimpose on our world the framework of reference points we use to distinguish the real from the unreal. 11 In this statement Jaramillo provides an important insight into the nature of her own work. Not only does it evolve in response to her own environment, it seeks to provide a visual equivalent to the deeply subjective experience of being in, perceiving and responding to the world around us. This highly specific goal is signalled within the works through some of the cryptic titles Jaramillo has assigned to her canvases. They allude to various framework[s] of reference points, from geometric systems to mythological traditions and spiritual cus-toms, which have been used in different times and places to organise reality. O Neill s drama after which Morning Becomes Electra is titled, for example, is itself a retelling of Aeschylus s Oresteia, a tragic trilogy that explores many of Ancient Greece s foundational myths. Two other paintings, 3,168 Codified (1974) and Gematria (1974), reference sacred numerology, another instance of human-ity s ingenious ability to conjure systems that ascribe meaning to the mysteries of the world. 3,168 was apparently honoured by early Christians as an exceptionally sacred number. Gematria is the name given to the system, originating in Assyro-Babyloni-an-Greek cultures and adopted into Jewish culture, which assigns words, names and phrases with specific numerical values. Implicit in the range of these allusions is an affirmation of the plurality of (often contradictory) structures and systems, across history and in different cultures, which have been created and adopted to organise our experiences of reality. Perception, whether of people, places or paintings, is understood as both utterly fluid and deeply rooted in one s specific environment. No wonder, perhaps, that Jaramillo settled on abstraction, with its refusal to denote a fixed objective reality, as her chosen mode of artistic expression. While her paintings clearly respond to the world and may even be conceived of as worlds in themselves, they also actively refuse to impose a specific vision of any world onto the viewer. Indeed, despite the carefully planned composition of line and the equally considered application of colour in her curvilinear abstractions, Jaramillo has insisted that these works were less about composition than mental space ; I lay out the groundwork and the viewer projects onto the space, filling the spatial arena with their own feelings and experiences. 12 Of course, this does not mean that viewers should feel pressured to try to devise elaborate personal interpretations or narratives through which to understand the paintings. Rather, it is an invitation to experience first-hand the way in which our eyes and our minds begin to process the visual data in front of us from our particular, embodied perspectives and to translate these fields of colour into immersive, sensory spaces. Stand in front of one of Jaramillo s flat curvilinear abstractions for long enough and the surface may begin to deepen, new

22 shades emerging from the multiple layers of paint mixed together to create the monotone field. This is even more likely to happen if you move around in front of the canvas, looking at it from different angles or in different lights. Focusing on the curved lines may have an altogether different effect; the lightning whips may seem to radiate light onto the surrounding surface, or, as English puts it, the line may seem to bear the force of exertion. In his analysis of Green Dawn, he describes the line as break[ing] the green field into two independent units, which one experiences as farther away and possibly receding. 13 The painting is transformed from a spare, hard-edged abstraction into a complex spatial environment through the viewer s own experience of the interaction between colour and line. This process, whereby the viewer becomes somehow included in the work itself, recalls Michael Fried s notorious definition of minimalism, or what he called literalist art, as that which in opposition to modernism foregrounds the experience of van object in a situation one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder. 14 Fried s condemnation of what he denounced vas theatrical objects unwittingly revealed the great power of minimalist art: its ability to expose as fiction the idea of art and aesthetic experience as transcendent, existing beyond history, culture and our own human bodies. Both the object itself, as well as our experiences and perceptions of it, is instead powerfully situated in three-dimensional time and space. In many ways in their unpredictable curves, luminous colour fields, and allusive, poetic titles Jaramillo s curvilinear abstractions do not conform to the strictest rules of minimalism. Yet, it seems right to make this connection, because of how these New York paintings say so little, but reveal so much about how we see and experience the world. 1. Melvin Edwards, Melvin Edwards by Michael Brenson, BOMB, 24 November [accessed 10 April 2017] 2. Virginia Jaramillo, artist statement in Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties, exh. cat. (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2014), p ibid. 4. ibid. 5. Virginia Jaramillo, phone conversation with author, 20 March Virginia Jaramillo, phone conversation with author, 3 August Frank Bowling, Outside the Galleries: Four Young Artists, Arts Magazine 45, no. 2 (November 1970), p Carter Ratcliff, The Whitney Annual, Part I, Artforum, April Darby English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), p English, p Virginia Jaramillo, Visual Theorems (unpublished), Virginia Jaramillo, phone conversation with author, 20 March English, p Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 153.