Andrea Kirsh’s provocative title, Sharp-Tongued Figuration, suggests artwork that will unsettle the exhibition’s viewers. They might be jostled, speared, bumped in to, jabbed, or elbowed as a pedestrian might be on a bustling street or boarding a crowded subway. But it’s the voice, and in this case the artist’s voice—translated into images—that is sharp. The artists’ barbs are intended to rattle, unnerve, or otherwise disturb the complacency of expectations that viewers bring into an art gallery. Each artist employs figurative imagery in her own vernacular; this approach allows for exaggerated characters and situations, that relate back to our lived reality while accentuating its tensions and conflicts.
The Stedman Gallery of the Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts welcomes back Andrea Kirsh as guest curator. Andrea’s earlier curatorial project in Spring 2015, From the Digital Tool Box, presented the work of four artists who worked digitally. Each artist used different tools to create a wide array of subject matter and media.
Sharp-Tongued Figuration brings together five artists with very different agendas, each animated by a compelling tone or agitated emotional state: Sue Coe’s drawings express anger at human cruelty; Nell Painter rewrites exclusive and biased narratives; Mickalene Thomas asserts an aggressive African American aesthetic of the body; Kukuli Velarde recovers the voice of devalued indigenous Andean culture; and Sandy Winters imagines unsettling visions of environmental degradation. These artists describe our world we know in reimagined and disorienting ways. It’s an experience the Stedman Gallery is pleased to offer you the viewer.
Sue Coe’s art is born from anger. It is the same anger that drove previous artists including Francisco Goya, Kathe Kollwitz, George Grosz and Jose Clemente Orozco who address war and social upheaval to chronicle mankind’s worst behavior. Trained as an illustrator, the British artist moved to New York City in 1972 and immediately found work with the New York Times creating illustrations for the Magazine and the op-ed pages. For a decade her illustrations appeared there and in Time Magazine, The New Yorker, and other major publications. But she became tired of being told to tone down her work so as not to offend readers or advertisers. Coe’s continuing anger stems from her opposition to values inherent to capitalism: it establishes hierarchies among people, places human interests above the rights of other living creatures, and emphasizes financial values over ethical ones. She believes that violence done to animals and that done to other humans stem from the same morality.