ART REVIEW : ‘Mentors’ Champions 12 Local Women in Art

“A Generation of Mentors,” organized by Helen Alameda Lewis and Josine Ianco-Starrels at Mount St. Mary’s College, features the work of 12 Southern California artists, all of them women and all of whom, by virtue of their achievements, are being proclaimed as role models--whatever that loaded term may mean. It’s the first of three such exhibitions initiated and sponsored by the Southern California Council of the California Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington.

“A Generation of Mentors” offers an antidote for the art world’s recalcitrant, bilateral divide, between the zealous pursuit of the new and the relentless celebration of the already celebrated. The women in this show are mature artists. The oldest, Claire Falkenstein and Helen Lundeberg, are in their 80s, and the youngest, Joan Tanner, is in her 50s.

Although several--including Betye Saar, Martha Alf, Selma Moskowitz and Helen Mayer Harrison (along with Newton Harrison, her husband and collaborator)--show regularly in galleries, on the whole, these artists are woefully under-recognized. Perhaps this is because most are neither part of a particular movement, nor champion a formal ideal that has been art-historically validated.

Many came of age artistically long before the feminist movement of the 1970s. They didn’t benefit from that movement’s stress upon establishing systems of support and exchange both within and without the art world.

Some have spent decades working in relative isolation. This is why the title of this show is rather ironic: Rather than role models, many of these women are well-kept secrets.

For this reason, “A Generation of Mentors” elides the usual criticisms endemic to identity-based, all-anything exhibitions. The importance of making this group of fine artists more visible to a broader art public overrides the homogenizing effect of conjoining their wildly disparate work solely on the basis of gender.

In an ideal world, this show would not have been necessary. The incessantly detailed paintings of Berkeley-born artist Ynez Johnston, which conjure computer chips, dreamscapes, maps to nowhere and circuitous, colorfuldoodles, would not be exhibited alongside Lundeberg’s serene, crisply articulated landscapes, the Harrisons’ aggressively political think-pieces nor Olga Seem’s darkly poetic meditations.

They would be aligned instead with the fanatically dense, inkblot grids of Bay Area Beat maverick Bruce Conner, for example, as both artists share an obsessive temperament, seducing us with the illusion of access to a mind that seems as if it is wound impossibly tight. Or, their aesthetic of accumulation would be seen in the context of the collaged miniatures of emerging artist Joyce Lightbody, although the latter’s belabored, sculptural surfaces are very different from the lambent glow of Johnston’s rice paper fantasies.

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Johnston’s work is a revelation here. So, too, are the paintings of Joyce Treiman, whose psychological acuity and remarkable draftsmanship are indebted to predecessors from Goya to Soutine, although the Surreal quality of Treiman’s figural groupings is unique.

Treiman’s first solo show took place in 1942, in Chicago; she continued showing work until her death in 1991. Her earliest paintings resembled those of Ben Shahn, in terms of both style and social conscience.

In the 1950s, she turned to abstraction, although her work always retained references to the figure. In the 1960s, after moving to L.A., Treiman returned to representation and began producing the inscrutable, highly mannered “incidents” for which she is best known.

Among them is “Adventure,” one of the highlights of this exhibition. Here, several figures are posed in an interior, dramatically lit in shades of brown and red.

Like actors in an Ionesco play, the figures seem oddly unrelated to one another: A man in a double-breasted suit screams; a woman next to him is oblivious; a clown-like fellow bends over, as if performing a pantomime; a bearded man gesticulates. The room is bare except for a stool, an armchair, a pillow and a lamp, each of which is flamboyantly portentous.

Treiman’s work generates its own heat. June Wayne’s is icy cool.

Wayne is justly venerated as the founder of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, which brought the art of lithography to a new level of sophistication in the United States. The graphic elegance of her own art transcends the different media in which she works.

A black-and-white tapestry from 1972 is as concise as Wayne’s more recent “light traps.” Silver, gold, gray and black metallic reliefs on mahogany panel, these intimately scaled works conjure magnetic fields and other astro-physical phenomena. They disturb the self-contained calm of Minimalism with all sorts of narrative implications.

Hardly the sedate work one might expect of a “mentor,” these objects are wonderfully inventive. Like much of the art on view here, they should--and will--find a wider audience.

* Jose Drudis-Biada Art Gallery, Mount St. Mary’s College, 12001 Chalon Road, Los Angeles, (310) 440-3250, through April 8. Closed Sunday and Monday.