American Places

by Therese Schwartz

[In this feature, artist and writer Therese Schwartz shares with Newsletter visitors selections from her series of collages, American Places. Her introduction to the works appears below, followed by images from the series. In a related Newsletter article, Nancy K. Ford explores some of Ms. Schwartz's background and its role in her American Places works. See Resources, below, for more information. Ed.]

This group of works is a visual report of my response to particular places in real time. They are a continuation of the American Places series, which I started five years ago. All the works shown here are made of 22 x 30 inch Stonehenge paper, acrylic paint, French crayon and photographic prints. I take photographs to locate these paintings specifically. The shots are geography, real places - they don't have to be interpreted.

I use photos because when people, or buildings, etc., are used as subjects there is also usually an aesthetic judgment about them. Which is why representing people and what they are doing often has a patronizing quality. As though the artist is standing above the objects and characterizing them - sympathizing, pitying, brutalizing, enhancing or satirizing.

There are times when this can be appropriate, suited to the actual. I am thinking specifically about the social realism of the 30's and 40's when so many were depicting the Depression. And being artists with a well-developed social consciousness, they designed their work with the hope of changing, or at least reforming, the world. These motives penetrated other media in that era. Think of all the Hollywood movies full of political dogma, now outworn, stale, appearing sometimes as a shadow in a small budget film. In the movie capitals of the world today when there is social comment, it is oblique, non-ideological, personal - The Grapes of Wrath have turned into fancy wines.

In the past, I have been drawn to abstraction in its purest form, based on geometry. I love its logic and its economy, and for a long time my work followed it. But I came to recognize its limits and how small a part it could have in expressing my present sensibility about where I am and who I am.

When I first thought about myself as an artist, I just wanted to be it - tried all kinds of materials, hung out with others like me, went to a lot of parties, tried a lot of stuff, talked about art endlessly but not about what it could do or who would see it. Those years are past, and I have grown more ambitious. Now I want to reach as much of the world as I can, and I want my painting and my words to have different but equal clarity, strength and validity.

In the paintings, I am recording visually where I was and what I thought, sensed, heard, smelled when I was there. The photos state the location and, as I don't have to explain the place, I am free to go anywhere with the experience.

I do my shoots in ordinary places - in this series, the subway, flea markets and yard sales.... I use common locations - good starting points from which viewers can take off on their own. These American Places series are my own visual recordings of where I was, what I saw and what I thought.

from American Places - Subway:

From the American Places - Subway series
Stonehenge paper, acrylic paint, French crayon and
photographic prints. 22 x 30 inches.
Image courtesy Therese Schwartz.
Copyright Therese Schwartz 2001. All rights reserved.

 

From the American Places - Subway series
Stonehenge paper, acrylic paint, French crayon and
photographic prints. 22 x 30 inches.
Image courtesy Therese Schwartz.
Copyright Therese Schwartz 2001. All rights reserved.

 

From the American Places - Subway series
Stonehenge paper, acrylic paint, French crayon and
photographic prints. 22 x 30 inches.
Image courtesy Therese Schwartz.
Copyright Therese Schwartz 2001. All rights reserved.

 

From the American Places - Subway series
Stonehenge paper, acrylic paint, French crayon and
photographic prints. 22 x 30 inches.
Image courtesy Therese Schwartz.
Copyright Therese Schwartz 2001. All rights reserved.

 

from American Places - Sunday in the Park:

From the American Places - Sunday in the Park series
Stonehenge paper, acrylic paint, French crayon and
photographic prints. 22 x 30 inches.
Image courtesy Therese Schwartz.
Copyright Therese Schwartz 2001. All rights reserved.

Resources:

Nancy K. Ford's article, Therese Schwartz, An American Artist, also appears in this issue of the Newsletter.

About the Artist:

Therese Schwartz, an artist known for her geometrically based panoramic collages, has had numerous solo exhibitions, both domestically and internationally. Her works can be found in museums, corporations, and private art collections, among them: The Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Corcoran Gallery of Art; Syracuse University Art Collection; Herbert F. Johnson Museum; Edwin A. Ulrich Museum; Ciba-Geigy Corporation; Barnet Arden Collection; Phillips Memorial Gallery; Women's Interart Center Museum; Advanced Elastomer Systems; PepsiCo Corporation; Monroe Geller Foundation; and the Huntington Museum. An accomplished essayist, Ms. Schwartz has written feature articles for such publications as Art News, Arts Magazine, Women Artists' News, and Art In America, where she contributed a four-part series entitled The Politicization of the Avant-Garde, which continues to be widely used as a research tool for art historians.

For the Arts4All Newsletter, she has contributed The Year that Was: Marching toward the Millennium, a four-part series on the state of the art world at the turn of the century, as well as Cinema Everyday, a report from the 1999 New York Film Festival, a two-part account of the Whitney Biennial 2000 and a two-part series on the 2000 New York Film Festival.