The Strange Life of Objects: The Art of Annette Lemieux
by Kristin Nord
Annette Lemieux’s art has been on the global radar ever since the 1980s, when fresh out of college and serving apprenticeships for Jack Goldstein and David Salle, she became a darling of the Manhattan media.
Fifty major art museums own her work, as do many private collectors. She has garnered an impressive list of awards and grants, solo and group shows, and teaching fellowships and positions.
“Despite her having realized what would be a dream of success to most artists, the esteem in which Lemieux is held remains far from the level merited by her achievements,” art critic Robert Pincus-Witten writes in the catalogue accompanying her retrospective The Strange Life of Objects: The Art of Annette Lemieux currently on view at the Kalamazoo Art Museum. Pincus-Witten has been following her since she emerged as a leading picture theorist who rejected painting as her primary medium. He dubs her alternatively a “minimalist conceptualist,” as well as a feminist minimalist, “if there is such a thing.” Depicted in such terms, it is any wonder that an artist who has achieved so much continues to bewilder so many?
Blessedly it should come as a relief to discover that Lemieux’s art can be accessed at other levels. Yes, there are allusions to Joseph Beuys and Philip Guston and Marcel Duchamp, but there is also childlike delight, humor, and lots of word play. There is light and dark, in other words the crisp graphics and grids, triangles and globes of the conceptualist, and work laden with emotional content that remains humanist at its core.
To dip into the source of her art one might want to visit Torrington in Connecticut’s Naugatuck Valley where Lemieux spent her formative years. It is a blue collar city of immigrants, of ethnic parishes and failed factories, where children make snowmen after a winter’s storm, and many young people, including Lemieux’s father and cousins, enlist in the military after high school. Grief resurfaces in such towns on Memorial Day, with its parades still featuring the open cars for Gold Star mothers.
Lemieux’s was a hardscrabble life, with her divorced single mother working for a minimum wage at the local five and dime. St Francis of Assisi parochial school was rife with prejudice, so much so that in her official biography she lists burning her school uniform on graduation night as a major turning point.
A school counselor laughed out loud when she proclaimed her intentions to be an artist and quickly penciled her in for the secretarial track. In time a succession of mentors, convinced of her gifts and impressed by her work ethic, began to open doors, first at Northwestern Connecticut Community College in nearby Winsted and later at the University of Hartford. Lemieux, who speaks in a disarmingly deep and scratchy voice that seems out of scale for her 5 foot 4 inch body, no longer “felt weird”; “I had found my tribe," she said.
With its close proximity to New York City and its energized faculty, Hartford was a hotbed of the leading conceptual artists of the day. Lemieux ate with gusto at the table of art history, studied and later apprenticed with Jack Goldstein and David Salle in their Manhattan studios. Salle helped put her work on the map, and soon a succession of solo and group shows followed.
(Amazon: The Strange Life of Objects: The Art of Annette Lemieux by Lelia Amalfitano, Judith Hoos Fox)
When a serious accident in her mid-20s forced her to give up the large conceptual paintings she had been making, she turned to found objects, initially believing “someone else’s story” was more interesting than her own. Over the next 30 years of her life as a professional artist and on the Arts and Sciences faculty at Harvard University (since 1996) she has continued to respond to the world around her, and to her own internal struggles as an artist in such varied ways that her work eludes easy categorization.
She paints, sculpts, manipulates found photographs and objects — she’s likely to spin us via a vintage school-room globe into a polka dotted galaxy, or line up a troop of helmets on wheels like fledglings being patterned along an intractable trajectory. There is stagecraft, mime, and performance art sometimes at work, embedded psychologically in her brick walls, hat molds and clotheslines. Crosses beam like beating hearts. Meanwhile the objects Lemieux selects have the capacity to block, move, or levitate. Grasp at the clues in the titles, Lemieux suggests; hold onto the mane for the ride.
Painting: The Seat of the Intellect, 1984: Oil paint on helmet; 11 x 9 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches. Collection of the artist. Photo: Ellen Page Wilson
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