Louise Fishman

Louise Fishman Roundtable
Wednesday, February 2nd, 2022, 1pm EST
on Zoom

Karma is pleased to host a roundtable discussion on the work of Louise Fishman featuring Aruna D’Souza, Archie Rand, and Amy Sillman, moderated by Clémence White

To watch the recorded discussion click HERE

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Louise Fishman in her studio, New York, April 2016. Photo: Christian Hogstedt/Art Partner Licensing.

Unstraight Lines: Louise Fishman (1939-2021)
Artforum International Article by Amy Sillman

THERE WAS AN EMAIL in my inbox on July 26 from Louise Fishman’s wife, Ingrid Nyeboe, with the brief, startling headline “Louise died.” Inside, I was cc’d on a sad notification: Louise had passed away the night before from complications of an illness. And with that, Louise was no more and, as the Jews say, may her memory be for a blessing.

What now stood in her place was the corpus of her work, a body of enormous heft. Louise’s very presence had always been like a force of nature to me anyway. I’d known her since the 1970s, though not that well. She was never a hangout buddy but an elder stateswoman, a serious-ass painter, a living link to the New York School stretching back to painting giants like Mitchell, Guston, and de Kooning and forward to all us wannabe-serious painters who were still in the grip of that kind of work. Sometimes I would see her in Chelsea walking around in utilitarian pants and sporty wraparound shades—and Louise was literally sporty. As a girl, she had wanted to be a professional ballplayer, and several writers since have made the connection between sports fields and Louise’s canvases, both of which are delineated rectangles of activity in which coded sets of gestures are pitched, whether baseball pitches or paint strokes. Anyway, when I saw her, I would not interrupt her because she was deep in thought—about what, who knows—but as de Kooning once said of someone, she had an abstract look on her face.

Read more HERE

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A Question of Emphasis: Louise Fishman Drawing
On view
Aug 26, 2021 to Feb 26, 2022
Main Level, East Gallery
Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Champaign, Illinois

A Question of Emphasis: Louise Fishman Drawing is the first career spanning exhibition and publication of Fishman’s works on paper from 1964 to the present. The project includes more than 100 works from the artist’s archive that have rarely been exhibited alongside significant institutional and private loans.

Citing John Cage’s response in 1965 to the question, “what is drawing?” A Question of Emphasis encompasses collage, oil and wax, thread, acrylic text, ink, charcoal, printmaking, oil stick, watercolor, and tempera in Japanese-bound Leporello (accordion) books. This full range of mediums foregrounds Fishman’s robust and dedicated practice of works on paper, which have never been studies for her large canvases. Instead, Fishman used drawing to think through physicality, materials, and intimacy on a different register: generally small- and medium-scale, often sculptural and tactile, and aligned to her particular historical contexts and her communities.

A Question of Emphasis examines the relationship between artist’s biography and drawing through feminist and queer perspectives. Fishman’s drawings are distinctive within her full oeuvre because many are dedicated to lovers—an illustrious network of lesbian writers, scholars, and critics that include Bertha Harris, Esther Newton, and Ingrid Nyeboe, Fishman’s spouse and longtime partner of the late critic and writer Jill Johnston. Fishman’s works on paper also honor the artist’s greatest teachers—Paul Cézanne, Piet Mondrian, Franz Kline, John Cage, Eva Hesse, and Agnes Martin among them.

Some works are collaborative, including prints Fishman made using her artist mother’s collagraphic plates, and her Angry Women acrylic text series made for friends and muses during periods of feminist consciousness raising in the 1970s (Fishman was a member of the activist groups Redstockings and Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell [W.I.T.C.H.] and editor of the Heresies journal issue on lesbian art and artists).

Drawing is often perceived as a window to an artist’s interiority and a spontaneous activity that happens more readily than painting on canvas. This project is a curatorial experiment that instead follows Fishman’s lead, through drawing, to convene a community of living and historical figures that are integral to the construction of self. While centered on the artist’s hand, Fishman’s works on paper are in fact radically open and give audiences a strong perspective of artmaking as a world-making project.

The exhibition catalogue published by KAM with Lucia | Marquand and distributed by D.A.P. features newly commissioned essays by KAM curator Amy L. Powell, scholars and artists Jill H. Casid and Catherine Lord, and a conversation between Fishman and artist Ulrike Müller.

Curated by Amy L. Powell, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

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Louise Fishman, Triumvirate, 2020, oil on linen, 23 × 16 inches; 58.4 × 40.6 cm

BOMB’s 40th Anniversary Gala & Auction
June 8—June 22, closing at 5:00pm EDT

BOMB Magazine × Artsy present BOMB 40th Anniversary Gala & Auction featuring works by artists including Louise Fishman, Louise Lawler, Trenton Doyle Hancock, William Wegman, Sanford Biggers, Fred Tomaselli, Richard Prince, Dorothea Rockburne, Cindy Sherman, Damián Ortega, and Lawrence Weiner.

Celebrating its 40th year, BOMB, a nonprofit, is now a multi-platform publishing house that provides unique insight into the creative process from its flagship print quarterly to its online Daily, its archive of 8500 primary-source documents, its essays by cultural thinkers, its Oral History Project that documents the life stories of influential African American artists, and its latest podcast series, FUSE. They champion artists of all backgrounds and disciplines because inclusive dialogue is integral to a vibrant democracy.

“It will always be of inestimable historical value to have provided these intimate glimpses into the personal centers of the creative process,” the critic and philosopher Arthur Danto declared. “The [BOMB] interviews refer to the culture in its fluid and formative state, and in this way contribute to its direction. In and through them the culture encounters itself.”

Every year, they host a Gala and Auction in New York, where they honor art luminaries. This year, they will celebrate their 40th Anniversary at the Gala on Friday, October 29, 2021 at Capitale in NYC where they will honor collector, Pamela Joyner, and visuals artists Walton Ford and Kiki Smith, and Salute Linda Goode Bryant.

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