Monday a.m. Artist Post 3/02

Judy Pfaff, world-renowned artist and art professor, was born in London, England in the year of 1946. At 12 years old, Pfaff traveled over to the U.S. where she would stay and go to school. She earned her BFA from Washington University, Saint Louis in 1971 and earned her MFA from Yale in 1973. Pfaff is mostly known for her integration of painting and sculpture into her work and making the two art forms function as a single unit. Pfaff’s sculptures and installations involve landscapes, architecture and color while aiming to achieve an overall organic feel. Much of Pfaff’s work is site specific and moves from being two to three dimensional once installed in its space. One thing Pfaff and I have in common is that both of our work has about 50% planning and 50% improvisational decision making. But her main goal in the completion of a piece is that all the elements work together and develop on one another.
Pfaff just concluded a show at Ameringer and Yohe in New York titled “Judy Pfaff: Paper.” The show consisted of several pieces of mixed media and paper large-scale installments, eight feet by eight feet. In the show’s press release dated January 15, 2009, Pfaff’s paper work is looked at as pieces that serve to add new purpose to every day materials while using her unique “collage” aesthetic. Also in the press release Pfaff is described as” one who creates worlds with paper. Small delicate drawings celebrate unfolding expansive ideas. Large works wrestle to compress entire Pfaff installations into low relief. The viewer is invited to journey through a myriad of creative suppositions and baroque space” (1).
Pfaff’s collections of prints and drawings I have found to be quite striking and somewhat sequential in their subject matter. A part of the Tandem Press, associated with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Art, Pfaff and other artists carry out experimental printmaking workshops. Pfaff’s “A Day or Part of A Day” is one of her prints made on the Tandem Press in 1999. The simple black and white printing technique to this one has helped the image function horizontally reading as a sequence or narrative. Also her piece titled “Naaimachinemuziek” has a very similar layout to my most recent work and is also created by the Tandem Press. The sequence it forms for the viewer is quite romantic and delicate in its own way.
Currently, Judy Pfaff is the Richard B. Fisher Professor of the Arts, Milton Avery Distinguished Professor of Art and Co-Director of the Studio Arts Program at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson. Pfaff is the recipient of the John D. and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation Award in 2004, the Bessie Award in 1984, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award in 1983 and a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1986. Pfaff considers her work and processes greatly influenced by artist and her previous graduate teacher at Yale, Al Held. His abilities as an abstract expressionist painter encouraged Pfaff to work in both the two and three-dimensional spaces. Right around the time of Held’s death, Pfaff dedicated her show at the Ameringer and Yohe titled “Buckets of Rain” in Held’s memory and all the knowledge he filled her with.

PBS Art 21
Ameringer & Yohe Website
Judy Pfaff Homepage
Tandem Press
Pfaff Article