JoAnne Carson

JoAnne Carson, View of the Alley, oil paint on wood and objects, 90" x 96" x 26", 1983. Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. JoAnne Carson (born 1953) is an American artist who is known for over-the-top, hybrid works in painting, sculpture and assemblage that freely mix fantasy, illusion and narrative, high and low cultural allusions, and seriocomic intent. She first gained widespread attention in the 1980s for what ARTnews critic Dan Cameron described as "extraordinary painted constructions—kaleidoscopic assemblages chock full of trompe-l’oeil painting, art-history quips, found objects and nostalgic echoes of early modernism." New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote that Carson's subsequent work progressed methodically into three dimensions, culminating in freestanding botanical sculpture that exuded "giddy beauty" and "unapologetic decorativeness"; Carson has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy in Rome and National Endowment for the Arts, and Yaddo artist residencies. Her mother, Edith Sachar, was a sculptor and jeweler and the first wife of painter Mark Rothko; her father, George Carson, was an engineer who worked in Westinghouse’s aeronautics division. After beginning college in Maryland, Carson completed art studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago (BA, 1976) and University of Chicago (MFA, 1979), producing abstract paintings on shaped canvasses, often with narrative themes. She exhibited actively in group shows at N.A.M.E. Gallery and Hallwalls (1978–9) and solo exhibitions at Nancy Lurie Gallery, N.A.M.E., MCA Chicago and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, attracting national reviews, museum acquisitions and grants, including a one-year American Academy in Rome residency. In 1985, she exhibited in the Whitney Biennial and received a Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) Award in the Visual Arts, which included a cash prize and a yearlong traveling exhibition.

In the next decade, Carson exhibited at the Ruth Siegel (New York), Dart (Chicago), Eva Mannes (Atlanta) and Sylvia Schmidt (New Orleans) galleries; in the 2000s, she has had solo exhibitions at the University of Maine Art Museum, and the Black and White, Claire Oliver, Joan Washburn and Plus Ultra galleries in New York, and appeared in group shows at the Fleming Museum of Art, National Academy Museum and Sheldon Art Museum, among others. Carson continues to teach at University at Albany, having been promoted to Professor in 2006 and served two terms as Department Chair. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, she focused increasingly on sculptural, nature-focused work; in the 2010s, she began to translate that sculptural world back into pictorial space in fantastical paintings and drawings. enacted both a "purgative" Oedipal struggle against modernist masters and a reinterpretation of them, likening the former work to "an encounter between a hurricane and Cezanne's Still Life, ca. 1900." Dan Cameron described them as aimed "squarely into the postmodern present," their narrative imagery "torn between a romanticized past and a present suffering from media burnout." to stand-alone, three-dimensional sculpture in the early 2000s; she has likened her process during that time to constructing large drawings in space. Her 1999 relief Wood Nymph combined fantasy, reality and illusion in an eight-armed, pie-wielding, torso-less Kali-like figure that seemed to emerge from a cross-section of California redwood, which was actually wood, fiberglass, cloth, and plaster seamlessly integrated beneath a veneer of trompe l'oeil wood grain. Like her early work, Carson's later painting draws on "high" art influences such as Cubism and Surrealism as well as popular culture inspirations, such as Looney Tunes cartoons. Critics describe them as over-the-top, hallucinogenic spectacles that "teeter on the edge of picturesque and grotesque," It directly engages the art historical fetishizing of nature as spiritual, authentic (e.g., the work of Constable and the Hudson River School) or feminized nurturer, as well as contemporary anxieties regarding aggressive land use, climate change, the lost "Arcadian" past, and what is "natural" in an age of cloning, genetic engineering, and technological tinkering; Carson describes the latter as "culture's paradoxical wish to believe in science as the new alchemy." which she envisions as a living, dimensional landscape painting and a practice that overlaps her art, with inspiration running in both directions. and University Art Museum at University at Albany.