Abstraction, Cows, and the Etiology of Self:
Jessie Gifford at the Washington Printmakers Gallery

This is a story about beginnings, both our own and others.  It is a story about life, not life in the general sense, but life as we live it, as humans, knowing and being, and especially knowing about being, that capacity within us which by its degree separates us from all other life forms inhabiting this world.  It is about what psychologists call consciousness, what theologians refer to as post-lapsarian, what academicians understand if not as the life of the mind then certainly as its source.  It’s a story about imagination and power, and about that specific human development which anthropologists generally believe allowed early man to encounter and survive environmental change.  This is a story about our becoming cognizant, and how as we evolved that ability was increasingly within us, growing and developing, both engaging and engaged by the outside world, a kind of reaching out and reaching in, which materialized, finally, in our neurological structures as both the site and source of our ability to understand ourselves and the world around us.  This is also a story about a gallery, two critics, an artist, and a retrospective show that’s not so much an ending, but rather an assertion of a beginning that has no end.

The gallery:  Founded in 1985, the Washington Printmakers Gallery (WPG) is a cooperative gallery established by a group of—yes, you guessed it—Washington area printmakers who wanted a gallery both to exhibit their work and to keep alive a printmaking tradition that goes back many hundreds of years.  As founder Carolyn Pomponio described the WPG on the occasion of its 20th anniversary, the WPG is “a gallery whose members offer the public, through exhibits, workshops, lectures, and demonstrations, knowledge of the uniqueness and beauty of the original print.”  Today, according to Carolyn, the WPG boasts more than 40 accomplished printmakers working in both traditional and contemporary styles.  From my own experience, I can tell you that the gallery is a treat to visit, most especially because of its inventory of quality woodcuts, monoprints, lithographs, etchings, aquatints, and innovative works.

Located at 1732 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, DC, just off of Dupont Circle, the Washington Printmakers Gallery is directed by Gail Vollrath, who possesses a MFA from the University of North Carolina, at Greensboro, and an extensive background as both a working artist and an arts administrator; hers is a felicitous preparation for someone working in her capacity.  Anyone who has been in and around the art world for even a short period of time can readily tell you that buyers of art come from all backgrounds and with varying degrees of understanding.  Some are highly educated in the fine arts and have sophisticated tastes, while others have never studied the fine arts and are completely new to art and art appreciation.  Clients from either background will find who and what they are looking for in Gail.  Gail is knowledgeable of fine art in general and of printmaking in particular.  She is very warm and personable.  While I (dealer-centric John) thought cooperatives like the WPG are rather unique and rare, Gail informed me that they are not so rare as I thought.

What is unique and rare about he Washington Printmakers Gallery, however, is its commitment to the tradition of printmaking in which the artist hand pulls the prints off of the press.  This method contrasts with publisher pulled prints which are usually printed in editions run by experts other than the artists who conceived the print images.  While I am not quick to embrace print editions run by publishers because I feel it is important for the artist him or herself to complete the printing as part of the artistic process which results in a final image, I can readily see that there are some advantages to printing this way.  For one, the equipment necessary to actually make prints is rather expensive, and thus all artists may not have access to it.  There is also something to be said for developing artists having access to the expertise and distribution networks that print publishers can offer them. 

Still, I, like the traditionalists at the Washington Printmakers Gallery, am mindful of what is lost in publisher pulled prints: the fine art and craft of artist conceived, artist created, and artist finished prints.  In recent decades, we have seen a tremendous rise in consumer interest in products that are hand and not machine made.  There is an interest in preserving products and in the processes for producing those products which are rooted in the past and in ways of life that are threatened by the way we live now. Ours is a vast commercial world driven by the economic imperative to capture mass and not so much niche markets.  Small companies and industries are gobbled up to make larger ones.  The many outweigh the one, whose possibilities for self-hood are increasingly composite and characterized by standardization, conformity, and group identification.  Folk art, organic foods, the so-called “artisanal” products, and products borne out of specific and identifiable traditions are all part of a reactionary movement away from mass produced products which are increasingly perceived as cold, impersonal, and inferior.

I think the Washington Printmakers Gallery is part of this reactionary movement.  The printmakers and members who comprise this gallery are committed to a tradition of printmaking which dates back at least to the 15th century in Europe and perhaps even to the 1st century in China, when woodblocks may have been used to imprint fabric.  Showing only artist etched, artist colored, and artist pulled prints and print-based innovations, the WPG honors this tradition and seeks to keep it vigorous.  Within its membership are artists who seek to refine and preserve the printmaking tradition and those who seek to use that tradition as a point of departure to innovate, as in the works of Bill Harris, Pauline Jakobsberg, Rob Lindsay, and Kirk Waldorf.  Every second Thursday of the month, the WPG hosts “Brown Bag Lunches” at which one of the member artists gives a lecture or demonstration on some aspect of printmaking.  The lunches are usually well attended and are open to anyone who would like to attend.

Two critics:  In 1971, art historian Linda Nochlin wrote an essay entitled, “Why Are There No Great Women Artists?”  In the essay, basically agreeing that there were, indeed, no great women artists, Nochlin sought to explain the reasons, both cultural and social, why male artistic genius (an idea of which she was suspicious) had so far triumphed.  It was an interesting essay and opened the way for subsequent discussion on subjects ranging from the meaning and definition of “great” art to assertions of uniquely feminine aesthetics and sensibilities.  The latter of these ideas was discussed in 1976 by Sylvia Bovenschen, who wrote “Is There A Feminine Aesthetic?”—an essay in which she explored the possibility of a uniquely and historically produced feminine aesthetic.    Together, these essays challenged universal definitions of genius and aesthetics in favor of definitions which are illuminatingly adaptive for exploring and appreciating artworks in the personal and historical contexts in which they were produced.  Today, these ideas are rather commonplace and ring of simple common sense.  But that is today.  Back when the articles were written, it did not always occur to critics and readers alike that in making and evaluating art, one should look at that art in light of both the person and the time which collaborated to create it.

An artist:  Born Jessie Nebraska Gifford in 1932 in Omaha, Nebraska, Jessie Gifford, a direct descendant of Hudson River School painter Sanford Robinson Gifford, began her art career almost immediately, in grade school, where she produced her first relief print with a green rubber eraser.  Subsequent study at Bennington, where she worked with Paul Feely, and Atelier 17, Paris, where she studied with British artist William Hayter, taught Jessie much about abstraction, which characterized her early work during the time after she graduated from Bennington and lived in New York City.  While I have not viewed works from this time, Jessie described them as experimental, especially those in which she used oil and acrylic paint, which she would “float” on wet medium.  Placing the canvases upon the floor, she would float and thin the paint, looking for new colors and tones (usually in gray and pink).  Often repeating shapes such as elongated ovals, Jessie continued to experiment until she developed what came to be known as “luminous rods,” which, looking back upon, Jessie now acknowledges were early expressions of repressed emotion. 

Growing up, Jessie learned a lot about art, mostly from her mother, who was an artist herself and who took Jessie to art galleries and museums to study and learn about art. Studying at Bennington, a famously progressive school, and in Paris, Jessie was immersed in abstract art and in the radical ideas of the time.  When she moved to New York, Jessie found a lively artistic center and an opportunity to reflect.  “It was then,” she says, “that [she] began to discover that [she] was in pretty bad condition…and that it was much harder to do things [artistically, personally, and politically] than [she] had thought.”  When asked if in her early work she was searching for herself and an understanding of the complex emotions she was experiencing, Jessie readily agrees.  She had begun psychoanalysis then and thinks that in keeping with Freud’s idea that the unconscious is always there on the surface and available for interpretation, that the surfaces of her early works are, in fact, representations in symbolic language of her own repressed emotions.  Frederick Castle has commented on this period in Jessie’s development.  In “The Caricatures of Jessie Nebraska Gifford,” he tells us, that by 1975, Jessie was beginning to withdraw and to reassess her own artistic assumptions and commitments.  She stopped painting and began to draw and to take photographs of people she knew.  This period of reappraisal, Castle thought—and I agree—is common among artists.  It’s a time for reflecting upon themselves and their training, and when they usually shed the often overwhelming influences of their teachers and mentors and begin, if successful, to formulate their own ideas and unique means for self expression. 

It would not be for several years until Jessie returned to painting.  And when she did, sometime around 1981, she had a new subject: cows!  For reasons that were not clear to her at the time, Jessie began to draw and paint cows: big cows, small cows, cows with four legs, cows with three legs, cows that were funny, docile, enduring, blank.  Knowing that Jessie grew up in Nebraska, you would think that she would know how to draw a cow, but she did not.  Returning home for a visit, she one day seated herself in a pasture with several cows and set about the work of familiarizing herself with them: the scale and size of their heads and legs, the mammoth arks of their flesh.  At first, Jessie recalls, the cows were in the background of her paintings, but as she continued to work, they slowly got bigger and bigger until they were the subject of her work.  Later, Jessie painted just sections of cows and experimented with completing the m by foregrounding papier-mâché versions of their corresponding and complementary parts, which she made out of chicken wire, paper, and plaster.  Finally, she tried, without success, to make metal sculptures of the cows to be integrated with her paintings on the wall.

Looking back on this work now, Jessie sees that she was beginning to understand something important about herself, something which had prefigured her early work and which would become the terrifying subject of some of her subsequent work.  “It was about this time,” Jessie says, “that the lid really began to come off.”  One day, drawing appropriations of other artists and doodling with her watercolor pencils, Jessie stopped.  It was then, she says, that the “memories began to spring loose.”  Having physical responses to the memories, Jessie picked up a pencil and began to write what turned out to be the story of her waking up in bed one night with her father and feeling the pain of his having penetrated her.

Incest: among horrible crimes, it is one of the most horrible and one of the most unspeakable.  When in a series of collages, Jessie started understanding and depicting her having been repeatedly raped by her father, friends and colleagues alike were often aghast and wanted her to stop.  Jessie did not.  Even today, incest, probably because we don’t like to think that there are men sick and selfish enough to fornicate with their own children, is an almost forbidden subject of discussion.  It was even more so back then when Jessie realized she had been violated.  Remembering was both a shock and a relief to Jessie, who finally understood much of her early life and how both it and her present life were prefigured by abuse.  The work resulting from this period in Jessie’s life has an historical, almost classical feel to it.  For her backgrounds, Jessie scoured old books for images of Titian and early Italian painters.  Copying the images she liked, she blew them up, sometimes drawing them onto the canvases and sometimes simply gluing them on.  The backgrounds have the effect of both historicizing and magnifying the horror inflicted upon Jessie by her father.  The revelation also explained Jessie’s earlier obsession with cows.  Cows, Jessie, tells me, signify mother, specifically her own mother, the enabler, who must have known what was going on between her husband and daughter and yet did not stop it.  Fortunately for Jessie, when she discovered the truth about her past, she was able to connect with others who had similar experiences.  Talking with them helped Jessie to feel less alone and had the effect of emboldening her to move on with confidence.

Jessie and I disagree about the next stage of her career, that point when she painted the infamous naked men series, which she describes as a brilliant idea formulated by her husband to get Jessie some attention and to maybe sell a few canvases.  The series certainly did that!  Working on large canvases so that she could use her arms to paint, Jessie pushed abstraction to the background and set about the work of painting realistic nude men with their penises unadorned by garlands or anything else, for that matter.  Jessie recalls loving to observe the reaction of people who came to view the show, which was exhibited at the A.I.R. Gallery in New York City.  “Some would burst out laughing and others would just clam up,” she says, “while others would walk in and proclaim, ‘It’s true, they’re here, the naked men!’”  And, indeed, they were.  As a child Jessie had noticed that in museums there were often images of naked women, but rarely of naked men.  She loved working against our conditioning to expect nude women in serious art, but not men.

For me, though, the work represents a psychological milestone for Jessie.  The way I see it, the men are symbolic of Jessie’s Father.  In her early work, the Father, because he was repressed, could only be abstracted.  But now, in these images, the Father was recognizable, and concomitantly indicative of Jessie’s growth and development since coming to grips with her past.  Jessie laughed when I mentioned this interpretive possibility to her and thinks I may be pushing things too far.  Perhaps she is right.

A retrospective show:  The retrospective of Jessie’s Gifford’s work at the Washington Printmakers Gallery is really very special.  Comprised of superb woodcuts from various periods in her career, the show is testament to Jessie’s amazing versatility and endurance.  From that first grade school relief print to her current experiments in color and form, Jessie has always sought after and responded to new forms, new mediums, new colors, new compositions, new aesthetics, new ideas, new tactile experiences, and new themes in her work.  The result is clear.  For more than 40 years now, Jessie has been one of America’s most prolific artists.  The events of her life—and her life in America during that time—are conjoined in her work.  There has always been something confrontational in        both Jessie and her work.  Coming of age in the tumultuous sixties, and again and again in the seventies, eighties, nineties—and still producing work, probably as I write—Jessie has become a kind of medium for conveying the personal, artistic, and cultural material of her time.

Even now, whether she is abstracting her own MRI scans or making prints off of the metal table which she has in her New York apartment, Jessie is always about the next step, the next stage, the next beginning in her work.  Ultimately, I think it is this need in Jessie to begin and to begin again that has propelled both her and her work to the point of transcendence.  Certainly, it is what characterizes all of her work, and what makes it so vital, enduring, and, yes, great.

In writing this piece, I am indebted to Jessie Gifford for her time and generosity; to Frederick Castle for his writings on Jessie; to Martha Gever, who first connected critics Linda Nochlin and Sylvia Bovenschen in “The Feminism Factor: Video and its Relation to Feminism;” and to Gail Vollrath, who prepared materials on Jessie for me and who helped me to think through some aspects of the article.

John A. Haslem, Jr. PhD
artlinePlus art critic