Art and Architecture: Louise Fishman | Louise Fishman, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal | An Art Book Series Event

FREE - Auditorium doors open at 5:30 p.m. 

On the occasion of the publication of the new monograph Louise Fishman, the acclaimed artist is joined in conversation by Helaine Posner, Chief Curator at the Neuberger Museum of Art and organizer of the museum’s major retrospective of Fishman’s work and Nancy Princenthal, art critic and former Senior Editor of Art in America.

Painting, scraping, repainting, and texturing are all part of Louise Fishman’s artistic process. Her resulting works feel at once energetic and orderly, celebratory and reverent. The book Louise Fishman accompanies the first-ever museum survey of Fishman’s large-scale gestural abstractions as well as a concurrent exhibition devoted to the artist’s lesser-known work in small-scale painting and sculpture. Chronologically tracing her creative path over 50 years, the book explores how Fishman negotiated the constraints established by the male-dominated Abstract Expressionists in the 1960s and ’70s to make for herself an adventurous and deeply personal painting practice. Full-color images trace a distinct transformation in the artist’s work—from minimalist grid overlays to more chaotic representations, to the textured use of ashes and beeswax, to her majestic gestural works of recent years. Beautifully produced to enhance Fishman’s vibrant, multilayered works in the context of modern and contemporary art, this volume is appreciated for its subject’s wide-ranging appeal as an artist and a trailblazer.

Copies of Louise Fishman (Prestel, 2016) are available for purchase and signing at the end of the event. 

Born in Philadelphia in 1939, Louise Fishman was active in the feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 70s. During this time, she temporarily abandoned painting for sculptural and material investigations that pursued a more distinctly feminine art. Her subsequent embrace of gestural abstraction unapologetically confronted the male- dominated history of artistic discourse. Continuing her support for the feminist cause, Fishman is also an advocate for gay and lesbian rights. Fishman lives and works in New York City. Her work is represented in many public collections, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York among others. A retrospective, curated by Helaine Posner, opens on April 3 at the Neuberger Museum of Art. In addition, an exhibition of her small-scale work, curated by Ingrid Schaffner, opens at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia on May 4. She has been represented by Cheim & Read since 1998.

Helaine Posner is Chief Curator at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY.  Her exhibitions at the Neuberger Museum include Louise Fishman: A Retrospective (2016), Robin Rhode: Animating the Everyday (2014), Dana Schutz: If the Face Had Wheels (2011) and Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary (2010), each accompanied by a monographic catalogue.  From 1991-1998, she was curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA where she curated exhibitions of contemporary art and wrote the accompanying catalogues. Posner is the author of a monograph on artist Kiki Smith (Monacelli, 2005) and was U.S. Co-commissioner for the 48th Venice Biennale where she organized Ann Hamilton: Myein.  She is the co-author of the award winning book After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art and of The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium (both published by Prestel).

Nancy Princenthal is a New York-based critic and former Senior Editor of Art in America; other publications to which she has contributed include Artforum, Parkett, the Village Voice, and the New York Times. Her book Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames and Hudson) was published in June 2015. She is also the author of Hannah Wilke (Prestel, 2010), and her essays have appeared in monographs on Shirin Neshat, Doris Salcedo, Robert Mangold and Alfredo Jaar, among many others. She is a co-author of two recent books on leading women 
artists, including The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium (Prestel, fall 2013). Having taught at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; Princeton University; Yale University, RISD, Montclair State University and elsewhere, she is currently on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts.

In its eighth year the program series An Art Book, initiated and organized by Arezoo Moseni, is a celebration of the essential importance and beauty of art books. The events showcase book presentations and discussions by world 
renowned artists, critics, curators, gallerists, historians and writers.

Events at The New York Public Library may be photographed or recorded. By attending these events, you consent to the use of your image and voice by the Library for all purposes.

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