Joanna Pousette-Dart

Joanna Pousette-Dart (born 1947) is an American abstract artist, based in New York City. She is best known for her distinctive shaped-canvas paintings, which typically consist of two or three stacked, curved-edge planes whose arrangements—from slightly precarious to nested—convey a sense of momentary balance with the potential to rock, tilt or slip. She overlays the planes with meandering, variable arabesque lines that delineate interior shapes and contours, often echoing the curves of the supports. Critic John Yau writes that her shaped canvasses explore "the meeting place between abstraction and landscape, quietly expanding on the work of predecessors" (such as Ellsworth Kelly), through a combination of personal geometry and linear structure that creates "a sense of constant and latent movement." Joanna Pousette-Dart, 3 Part Variation #7, acrylic on canvas on wood panels, 67" x 93", 2012–3.

Pousette-Dart has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and National Endowment for the Arts, and is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Brooklyn Museum, among others. She has exhibited internationally, at institutions including MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, Museum Wiesbaden, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Pousette-Dart is the daughter of abstract-expressionist painter and New York School founding member Richard Pousette-Dart.

Early life and career Pousette-Dart was born in New York City in 1947 to poet Evelyn Gracey and painter Richard Pousette-Dart; her grandparents, Flora and Nathaniel Pousette-Dart, were, respectively, a poet and musician and a painter. During that time, Pousette-Dart lived and worked intermittently in New Mexico; her experience of the vast expanses of the landscape has had a profound influence on her work from the 1990s onward.

In her later career, Pousette-Dart has had solo exhibitions at the Charles Cowles, Moti Hasson and Lisson galleries in New York, Texas Gallery (Houston), Museum Wiesbaden (Germany), She has also held teaching positions at Hunter College (1986–99) and New York Studio School, as well as guest artist positions at a variety of institutions including Yale University. Her large-scale, mid-1970s paintings employ expressive paint handling, velvety sand-textured surfaces, and soft-edged, interwoven rectangular areas of dark, close-valued grays, purples and dark reds; Roberta Smith and Hilton Kramer likened their atmospheres to the work of artists such as Klee, Rothko and Braque. These works utilized an uninhibited mix of mediums, adapting Abstract Expressionist techniques to serial and temporal ends, with paint flowing uninterrupted from one surface on to the next; Art in America particularly noted a monumental, two-sided, freestanding untitled work featuring metallic pigment veiled in passages of dark oil. These paintings, which draw on encounters with medieval frescoes and mosaics and early Mozarabic manuscripts, include the "Beatus" series (1985–9), named for an eighth-century monk and manuscript author.

Early shaped canvasses (1993–2002) In the early 1990s, Pousette-Dart's perceptions of the space and light of the American Southwest inspired her to abandon painting within a rectangular format. Untitled, Dark Edge diptych (1993–6, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) is a representative and transitional work of this period, featuring two curved-side-down hemispheres, thickly painted grounds and Japanese calligraphy-like gesture. They feature configurations of curved panels with interior forms that can evoke both natural and manmade forms. They are overlaid with swooping, sinuous linear elements that define shapes and contours, which critics note for their graphic assuredness and compare to Arabic calligraphy or Native American art. Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Parrish Art Museum, and Portland Art Museum, as well as many corporate and private collections.