Awards
2009 Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
Mary Heilmann
Mary Heilmann (photograph by Joe Gaffney)
“Each of my paintings can be seen as an autobiographical marker, a cue, by which I evoke a moment from my past, or my projected future, each a charm to conjure a mental reality and to give it physical form.” So writes Mary Heilmann, an “abstract” painter who insists, nonetheless, that her work operates with no fidelity to that term. She names her canvases after songs, after friends, after places she’s been or hopes to go. She refuses the inherent “flatness” of painting, insisting that every painting is also a thing, prodding canvases into shapes and ways that are more sculptural. She asks that we grant painting a temporal dimension—“Gazing at a picture · can amuse me for hours,” she says. “It’s like watching a movie.” Heilmann’s palette ranges from the dainty to the obscene, but it is always lush. Her contribution to art has been long and generous.
Her recent retrospective exhibition, Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone, curated by Liz Armstrong, opened at the Orange County Museum of Art in California in spring 2007 and traveled for nearly two years to the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas; the Wexner Center for Arts in Columbus, Ohio; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. It showcased the work of an audacious yet respected artist who, after moving in 1968 to New York from California (where she had grown up and gone to school), gave up a more object-based practice in favor of painting—mostly because, to hear her tell it, painting was what you “shouldn’t” do.
Mary Heilmann, Surfing on Acid, 2005, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in. (artwork © Mary Heilmann)
Part of a tight community of artists, Heilmann has always painted for her peers. She has also taken part in a great number of exhibitions: in the 1972 Whitney Annual; in a number of women-only shows in New York (though Heilmann’s ambivalence about being asked to perform the role of “female artist” is a topic she often addresses); in P.S.1’s 1977 The Painting Show; in Conceptual Abstraction at Sidney Janis Gallery in 1991; very recently in the large-scale traveling exhibition, Wack! Art and Feminist Revolution; and in many solo shows with her long-time gallerist, Pat Hearn. (Since Hearn’s death and the gallery’s closing, Heilmann has shown at 303 Gallery.)
Jury: Johanna Burton, Whitney Museum Independent Study Program; Kevin Consey, California College of the Arts; and Jonathan Fineberg, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
