#ellen lesperance

[mentaltimetraveller]

Ellen Lesperance, Fighting Amazon (Throwing Urn), 2014, pigmented slip on terracotta, compost-dyed silk, 30.4 x 11.4 x 11.4 cm

[thunderstruck9]

Ellen Lesperance (American, b. 1971), 1921, Anni Fleischmann Demonstrates Simultaneous Contrast Herself with the Help of a Knitted I-Cord Necklace; It Would Be a Year Before Even Meeting Josef Albers, 2009. Gouache and graphite on tea stained paper, 22 x 29 in.

[paintingafterpainting]

Ellen Lesperance

[chainsawpunk]

Ellen Lesperance, Who Are The Witches? Where Do They Come From?, 2019, gouache and graphite on tea stained paper, 42 x 29.5 inches

[skowhegan]

Diana Al-Hadid (A ‘07), Laylah Ali (A ‘93), Firelei Báez (A ‘08), Huma Bhabha (F ‘12), Katherine Bradford (F ‘09), Jane Fine (A ‘89), Nan Goldin (F ‘96), Guerrilla Girls (F ‘00), Harriet Korman (A ‘68), Ellen Lesperance (A ‘99), Carrie Moyer (A ‘95, F ‘10), Sophia Narrett (A ‘14), Dona Nelson (F ‘13), Catherine Opie (F ‘10), Howardena Pindell (F ‘80), Wendy Red Star (A ‘06), Martha Rosler (F ‘06), Susan Rothenberg (F ‘80), Alison Saar (F ‘93), Joyce J. Scott (F ‘96), Joan Semmel (F ‘91), Beverly Semmes (A ‘82, F ‘01, ‘05), Shahzia Sikander (F ‘05), Amy Sillman (F ‘00), Kiki Smith (F ‘93), Shinique Smith (A ‘03), Stephanie Syjuco (A ‘97), Mickalene Thomas (F ‘13), Mildred Thompson (A ‘56), Kara Walker (F ‘01), Marie Watt (A ‘95), Carrie Mae Weems (F ‘00), Saya Woolfalk (A ‘04) Never Done: 100 Years of Women in Politics and Beyond Wachenheim Gallery, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866 September 17, 2020 - June 06, 2021

[viviseconds]

Installation View, Drawing 2020 at Gladstone Gallery, New York, 2020

[brooklynmuseum]

If you ask someone to name five artists, they will likely name prominent male artists, but how many people can list five women artists? Throughout March’s Women’s History Month, we will be joining institutions around the world to answer this very question posed by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NWMA). We will be featuring a woman artist every day this month, and highlighting artists in our current exhibition Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection which explores a wide range of art-making, focusing on enduring political subjects—encompassing gender, race, and class—that remain relevant today. The show is on view until March 31, 2019.

Together we hope to draw attention to the gender and race imbalance in the art world, inspire conversation and awareness, and hopefully add a few more women to everyone’s lists.

Ellen Lesperance uses painting and knitting to create complex works that are largely inspired by women weavers of the Bauhaus, the Pattern and Decoration Movement, and body-based feminist artists of the 1970s and 1980s. Lesperance first creates gouache paintings on paper, which serve as patterns to recreate historic knit garments, which she locates within archival images and video documentation of women involved in Direct Action feminist protest. The physical labor she expends to create her knitted pieces intrinsically makes a statement about the demands of women’s labor.

Posted by Chiara Mannarino Ellen Lesperance (American, born 1971). Cardigan Worn by One Woman of the Boeing Five, Tried for Entering the Boeing Nuclear Missile Plant on September 27th, 1983, Sentenced to Fifteen Days in the King County Jail for Defending Life on Earth, 2011. Wool sweater hand knit by the artist, and gouache and graphite on tea stained paper. Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Purchase gift of Jill and Jay Bernstein, 2012.18a-c.

[blakegopnik]

CHRISTMAS SWEATER, OR FEMINIST PROCLAMATION?

THE WEEKLY PIC: This consummately peculiar but also quite rigorous “painting” is by Ellen Lesperance. It and others like it are some of the most compelling works in “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” at the New Museum in New York. To make the series, Lesperance studied the sweaters that feminist activists have worn in their activism, as seen in photos taken in all kinds of different places and times. She then translated the designs that she saw in the shots into the kinds of patterns you might use to re-knit those sweaters, although rendered with such care for esthetics that they also function as paintings.The gouache I’m showing, from 2015, is titled “Members of the A.I.R. Gallery Cooperative Meet on a Saturday Morning in 1977 Soho to Redress History.”

I love the complexity and weirdness of Lesperance’s premise, and the fine job it does of paying homage to feminist predecessors – the sheer labor and research involved is an obvious sign of respect. I also love the way Lesperance is working with some of the classic elements of modernist painting from the 1960s and ‘70s – just the moment that feminism was beginning to hit its stride. She tips her hat to the grid, to process, even to elements from early computer art. But she gives them a feminist accent. (Image courtesy the artist and Adams and Ollman Gallery, Portland)

For a full survey of past Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.