Judy Ledgerwood: : Surface/Depth: The Decorative After Miriam Schapiro
Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY
22 March - September 9, 2018
The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) presents Surface/Depth: The Decorative After Miriam Schapiro, an exhibition that showcases twenty-nine collage paintings by the pioneering feminist artist Miriam Schapiro in conversation with twenty-eight works by nine contemporary artists: Sanford Biggers, Josh Blackwell, Edie Fake, Jeffrey Gibson, Judy Ledgerwood, Jodie Mack, Sara Rahbar, Ruth Root, and Jasmin Sian. Bringing into focus the key, but unheralded, role Schapiro played in the reframing of craft and decoration in the American art world, this juxtaposition of historic and contemporary work highlights ways in which the decorative continues to be utilized as a critical tool in art today.
A site-specific tempera mural by Judy Ledgerwood, Chromatic Patterns for the Museum of Arts and Design is inspired by the history of abstract painting as well as a range of domestic textiles. Reveling in the promiscuity of pattern and the association of the decorative with the female body, sensuality, and immersive experience, Ledgerwood offsets the gallery’s architecture and the logic of her underlying gridded composition with an animated floral motif and a seductively intense color palette.