The support of women artists for each other is helping eliminate the dichotomy between what is labelled “major work,” and work which is often considered “other work” or “personal work” or what can be called our “closet” art.
Patsy Norvell
Patsy Norvell, known for her sculpture, installation and public art, has been active in the women's movement since 1969. In 1972, she participated in the groundbreaking show, 13 Women, held in a rented space on Prince Street in New York and later that year, founded A.I.R. Gallery, the first co-operative gallery in the country to show only women artists. Her own art embraced experimental materials and in her notable work from 1973, Hair Quilt, Norvell has taken the craft tradition of quilting and created a striking autobiographical conversation by using clippings of her friend's hair to create patterned squares.
Established by the artist before her death in 2021, The Louise Fishman Foundation provides support for artists, educational programming and community opportunities through the protection and stewardship of Fishman’s artistic legacy. Sold to benefit the foundation, the collection offered here comes from Fishman’s estate and features work by Suzan Frecon, William Eggleston, Harriet Korman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Purvis Young, and of course, Louise Fishman herself.
As a collector, Fishman sought art by artists whom she respected, and works that appealed to her visually. She never concerned herself with trends or market values, and applied the same no-nonsense philosophy to collecting that she exercised in her artistic practice, declaring, “If good painting is what you want to do, then good painting is what you must look at. Take what you want and leave the dreck.” Filtered through her decisive eye and amassed over a decades long career, what Louise took was a thoughtfully collected selection of compelling and dynamic artworks by her peers, contemporaries, and those who inspired her.
If good painting is what you want to do, then good painting is what you must look at. Take what you want and leave the dreck.
Louise Fishman
“It is unstraight lines, or many straight and curved lines together, that are eloquent to the touch. They appear and disappear, are now deep, now shallow, now broken off or lengthened or swelling. They rise and sink beneath my fingers, they are full of sudden starts and pauses, and their variety is inexhaustible and wonderful.”...The author is a blind woman, Helen Keller. Her sensitiveness shames us whose open eyes fail to grasp these qualities of form.
Meyer Schapiro, “On the Humanity of Abstract Painting,” 1960
There was an email in my inbox on July 26 from Louise Fishman’s wife, Ingrid Nyeboe, with the brief, startling headline “Louise died.” Inside, I was cc’d on a sad notification: Louise had passed away the night before from complications of an illness. And with that, Louise was no more and, as the Jews say, may her memory be for a blessing.
What now stood in her place was the corpus of her work, a body of enormous heft. Louise’s very presence had always been like a force of nature to me anyway. I’d known her since the 1970s, though not that well. She was never a hangout buddy but an elder stateswoman, a serious-ass painter, a living link to the New York School stretching back to painting giants like Mitchell, Guston, and de Kooning and forward to all us wannabe-serious painters who were still in the grip of that kind of work. Sometimes I would see her in Chelsea walking around in utilitarian pants and sporty wraparound shades—and Louise was literally sporty. As a girl, she had wanted to be a professional ballplayer, and several writers since have made the connection between sports fields and Louise’s canvases, both of which are delineated rectangles of activity in which coded sets of gestures are pitched, whether baseball pitches or paint strokes. Anyway, when I saw her, I would not interrupt her because she was deep in thought—about what, who knows—but as de Kooning once said of someone, she had an abstract look on her face.
