50 Paintings

Judy Ledgerwood | The Brooklyn Rail

Installation view: 50 Paintings, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI, 2023-24. Courtesy of the Milwaukee Art Museum.

By Saul Ostrow

Given my interest in painting, I found myself going to Milwaukee to see an exhibition that promised to be taking the pulse of contemporary American painting—all the works in it had been made in the last five years. A show of fifty paintings by fifty different painters who the curators claimed were defining the field of contemporary painting seemed a bold move, amidst the general confusion that has been generated by AI, market manipulation, auction house publicity, critical pronouncements, and a general cultural malaise that has lingered since the 1990s. How could any critic resist such a challenge; what could an exhibition indexed to the simple subject of “Painting,” offer? Whatever the curators’ intentions, 50 Paintings seemed to be a brave attempt to bring some discernment to a confused situation.

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Judy Ledgerwood on the Modern Art Notes Podcast

Judy Ledgerwood | Modern Art Notes Podcast

By Tyler Green

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Episode No. 640 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Judy Ledgerwood and curator Lisa Volpe. 

Ledgerwood is included within “50 Paintings” at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The exhibition features paintings made in the last five years by 50 artists from around the world.  It was curated by Margaret Andera and Michelle Grabner and is on view through June 23. Ledgerwood is also on view in “Disguise the Limit: John Yau’s Collaborations” at the University of Kentucky Art Museum in Lexington through June 1.

Ever since the 1980s, Ledgerwood’s paintings have engaged transatlantic histories related to abstraction and decoration from a distinctive feminist point-of-view. Her work is in the collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the MCA Chicago.  

Volpe is the curator of “Robert Frank and Todd Webb: Across America, 1955”, which opens at the Addison Gallery of American Art this weekend. It will remain on view through July 31. The exhibition presents work the famed Frank and the less-well-known Webb made as they traveled the United States on Guggenheim fellowships in 1955. The excellent exhibition catalogue was published by the MFAH in association with Yale University Press. Amazon and Bookshop offer it for $25-47.

Frank and Webb images are at Episode No. 630.

Instagram: Judy Ledgerwood, Lisa Volpe, Tyler Green.

Air date: February 8, 2024.

Judy Ledgerwood’s Playfully Subversive Patterns

Judy Ledgerwood | Hyperallergic

Judy Ledgerwood, "First Color" (2022), oil on canvas, 15 inches x 15 inches (all images courtesy Denny Gallery)

By John Yau

A lot of writers, myself included, have connected Judy Ledgerwood’s exuberant abstractions to the Pattern and Decoration art movement. Historically speaking, Pattern and Decoration (1972–1985) challenged the canon-making orthodoxies and conventions that dominated much art in the 1960s and ’70s, and that continue to cast their shadow. This challenge to the canon, which manifests itself as celebrations of the female body and sexuality in Ledgerwood’s work, is inseparable from her vocabulary of hand-painted quatrefoils, interlocking triangles, and thickly painted labial shapes. What distinguishes Ledgerwood’s work from the earlier generation of women artists working in the domain of Pattern and Decoration is its bluntness and humor. 

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The artists reappropriating 'feminine crafts' through a queer lens

Judy Ledgerwood | Creative Bloom

Judy Ledgerwood, Visigothic, 2021

Judy Ledgerwood, Visigothic, 2021

“Chicago-based abstract painter Judy Ledgerwood's work considers domestically created decorative work made by women across cultures, using circles, quatrefoils, and seed-like shapes organised within triangles and chevrons that "she perceives as a womanly cypher symbolic of feminine power," according to the gallery.”

Review: Why the ‘Color Walks’ abstractions of Judy Ledgerwood captivate like few can

Judy Ledgerwood | Los Angeles Times | by Christopher Knight

Judy Ledgerwood, Crossing Over, 2012

Judy Ledgerwood, Crossing Over, 2012

Depending on what you think a painting is, the exceptional exhibition of mostly recent work by Chicago-based artist Judy Ledgerwood at 1301PE includes eight, 13 or 21 paintings.

A bunch of them are conventional canvases covered edge to edge with paint — oil or acrylic or both. Some do double duty by layering a picture of a painting on top of another painting. (Usually the picture is banner-like, its softly draped shape contrasted with the taut, stretched shape of its support.) Yet others do another kind of double duty as glazed and decorated ceramic vases.

All of them are sensual in the extreme, a condition amplified by luxurious, irrational color. Blue tends toward cobalt; red is crimson, and yellow and orange are sunny citrus. Pink is always hot.

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