Left to right: Jenny Holzer, Lady Pink, Nan Goldin
Gallery 98 features art and art ephemera connected to artists active in downtown New York in the 1960s to 90s. This was a time when artists were exploring their own real-life experiences, often creating works incorporating self-portraits and depictions of friends.
These five works spotlight some of the era’s most daring women artists.
JENNY HOLZER
Mike Glier, Jenny Holzer from the “Calling Women” series, 1983; two-color lithograph published by Art Institute of Chicago, Oxbow, edition of 25 signed by the artist, 30 x 22 inches.
This 1983 portrait of Jenny Holzer was created by her husband Mike Glier, a fellow member in the artists’ group COLAB. It is part of a series of works in which Glier sought to bring out the assertiveness of his female subjects by directing them to call out the name of a person, place or thing they felt strongly about. The “Calling Women” theme was particularly apt for Holzer, who was then finishing her “Inflammatory Essays,” a series of all-cap aphorisms.
LADY PINK
Tom Warren, Sandra Fabara (Lady Pink), 1982; photograph signed by Warren, 10 x 13 inches.
Lady Pink is the rare woman artist to emerge from the graffiti culture that began to move into galleries in the 1970s and continues advancing today. Photographer Tom Warren’s traveling “Portrait Studio” was an art project designed to provide low-cost portraits for locals living near art spaces like Fashion Moda in the South Bronx, and Semaphore Gallery in the East Village, two venues where Lady Pink also exhibited.
STURTEVANT
Sturtevant, Duchamp Wanted, 1992; offset print Poster, 13.25 x 10.25 inches.
Elaine Sturtevant (1924 – 2014) pioneered a bold new form of creativity in the 1960s by simply replicating works by her contemporaries. Here she reproduces Duchamp’s famous “Wanted” poster and substitutes her own picture dressed as a man in place of the cross-dressed Duchamp in the guise of Rrose Sélavy, his female alter-ego. Sturtevant’s work received delayed recognition in a posthumous retrospective at MoMA in 2014.
COLETTE
Colette, Justine & The Victorian Punks: Records from the Story of My Life, Mixed Media, 1978; mixed media signed by artist, 12.25 x 12.25 inches.
Performance and installation artist Colette has been documenting her work since the mid-1970s in a series titled “Records from the Story of My Life,” twelve-inch square collages (sized like LPs) incorporating photographs embellished with paint and other materials. Colette assumed the persona of Justine & The Victorian Punks for this 1978 collage with an image connected to performances at the art space P.S.1, and in the window of the boutique Fiorucci. Colette has been the subject of an online exhibition at Gallery 98.
NAN GOLDIN
Cara Perlman, Nan Goldin, 1981; finger-paint on finger-paint paper, 16 x 20 inches.
Cara Perlman’s finger-paint portrait of photographer Nan Goldin dates from 1981 when they were both bartenders at Tin Pan Alley, a Times Square basement bar with a mixed clientele of artists and others who were part of the local scene. The portrait is from a series of finger-paint portraits featured in an online exhibition at Gallery 98.
