Charlotte Schulz (born 1960) is an American visual artist best known for intricate charcoal drawings, sometimes composed of multiple sheets that she tears, folds and distresses in order to disrupt the two-dimensional picture plane.Parks, John A. "Space, Charcoal, and the Mind of Charlotte Schulz," ''Drawing'', Spring 2007, p. 116–27.Shuster, Robert
"Best in Show,"
''The Village Voice'', October 20, 2010, p. 149.Genocchio, Ben

''The New York Times'', January 27, 2008. Retrieved August 17, 2020. Her work explores personal and collective responses to traumatic, often-public, experiences and events, interweaving vignettes of landscape, interiors, disasters and unexpected elements in dreamlike combinations that upend spatial and temporal conventions.Gupta, Arjun. "Charlotte Schulz," ''artUS'', Fall 2008. Retrieved August 17, 2020.Castelbuono, Juliann
"On the Cover,"
''Chronogram'', October 2011, p. 12. Retrieved August 17, 2020.Hodara, Susan

''The New York Times'', April 12, 2013, Sect. WE, p. 11. Retrieved August 17, 2020. '' Artillery'' critic Seph Rodney describes her drawings as works of "elegant and surreal lyricism" that are exquisitely rendered, thick with detail, and perplexing in their mix of fractured visual logic, overlapping realities, and speculative ruminations on space and time.Rodney, Seph
"Charlotte Schulz,"
''Artillery'', November 2014. Retrieved August 17, 2020. Schulz has been recognized with a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

and awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and New York Foundation for the Arts.''Artforum''
"NYFA Announces 2017 Fellows,"
News, July 7, 2017. Retrieved August 17, 2020.''Artforum''
"2010 Guggenheim Fellows Announced,"
News, April 17, 2010. Retrieved August 17, 2020.The Pollock-Krasner Foundation
Charlotte Schulz
Artist. Retrieved August 17, 2020. She has had solo exhibitions at

Smack Mellon Smack Mellon is a non-profit arts organization located at 92 Plymouth Street, in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Smack Mellon supports emerging, under-recognized mid-career, and women artists through a highly regarded exhibition program, competitive studio re ...

, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Mills College Art Museum,Streitfeld, L.P. "Preparing fertile ground in Ridgefield," ''The Advocate & Greenwich Times,'' September 7, 2003, p. 3. and been featured in group shows at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Tampa Museum of Art, and Dorsky Gallery, among others.Spinella, Rachel
"Art on Paper at the Weatherspoon,"
''The Carolinian'', February 13, 2019. Retrieved August 17, 2020.Birmingham, Mary. "Women's Work," ''The Jersey Journal'', March 2, 2007, p. 4.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Charlotte Schulz
Fellows. Retrieved August 17, 2020. Schulz lives and works in Peekskill, New York and teaches at

Parsons School of Design Parsons School of Design, known colloquially as Parsons, is a private art and design college located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Founded in 1896 after a group of progressive artists broke away from established Manhatt ...

in New York City.

Early life and career

Schulz was born Charlotte Lentner in the small working-class city of

Massillon, Ohio Massillon is a city in Stark County, Ohio, Stark County in the U.S. state of Ohio, approximately west of Canton, Ohio, Canton, south of Akron, and south of Cleveland. The population was 32,146 at the 2020 United States Census, 2020 census. Mass ...

in 1960.Parsons School of Design
Charlotte Schulz
Faculty. Retrieved August 17, 2020. After studying art at Kent State University, she and her family moved to Florida, where she worked with painter

Mernet Larsen Mernet Larsen (born 1940) is an American artist known for idiosyncratic, disorienting narrative paintings that depict a highly abstracted, parallel world of enigmatic and mundane scenarios.Smith, Roberta''The New York Times'', October 4, 2012. ...

and earned a BA degree at University of South Florida (1983).Milani, Joanne. "Art of homes stretches into the unconscious," ''Tampa Tribune'', November 4, 1996. She later studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1992) before returning to University of South Florida to complete an MFA degree in 1993. After graduating, Schulz began to exhibit her paintings and drawings regionally, including shows at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art,

Dunedin Fine Art Center The Dunedin Fine Arts Center (DFAC) hosts exhibitions, festivals, classes, and workshop space in Dunedin, Florida Dunedin is a city in Pinellas County, Florida, United States. The name comes from ''Dùn Èideann'', the Scottish Gaelic name for ...

, Society of the Four Arts, Tampa Museum of Art, and Lee Scarfone Gallery (solo);Marger, Mary Ann. "Diversity is in the works," ''St. Petersburg Times'', June 17, 1994, p. 20.Milani, Joanne. "Florida artists," ''Tampa Tribune'', July 28, 1994, p. I.Milani, Joanne. "Some scenes from a crisis," ''Tampa Tribune'', September 8, 1995, p. I.Marger, Mary Ann. "Where art dwells," ''St. Petersburg Times'', March 22, 1996, p. 25. the Ringling show, curated by former Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler, led to the museum's purchase of her painting, ''Room of My Own'' (1992).Geldzahler, Henry. "Featuring Florida," Sarasota, FL: John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, March 1994. In 1999, Schulz moved to Brooklyn. She was awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and

Aljira Center for Contemporary Art Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art was an artist-centered space in Newark, New Jersey, United States founded in 1983, designated a Major Arts Organization by New Jersey's State Council on the Arts. Aljira displayed the work of both establishe ...

in 2001 and 2002, respectively.''Artnet''
"NYFA Grants, 2001,"
News, July 2, 2001. Retrieved August 17, 2020.Bischoff, Dan. "Aljira's Emerge 2003," ''The Sunday Star-Ledger'', August 15, 2004, p. 3. Retrieved August 17, 2020. Her first solo museum show, "An Insufficiency in Our Screens" (2007), was held at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and traveled to the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland in 2008.Cheng, DeWitt
" A House Subdivided: Charlotte Schulz deconstructs the McMansion,"
''East Bay Express'', July 16, 2008. Retrieved August 17, 2020. Her subsequent solo exhibitions have been held at Smack Mellon and Wake Forest University (2010) and Beacon Project Space (2015).Patterson, Tom
"Fundamental Medium,"
''Winston-Salem Journal'', November 28, 2010, D-5. Retrieved August 17, 2020. Schulz has taught at Parsons School of Design since 2000.

Work and reception

Schulz indicates that two foundational interests have structured her art: space and narrative. Influenced by philosophers exploring malleable conceptions of space and time, such as Gaston Bachelard,

Gilles Deleuze Gilles Louis René Deleuze ( , ; 18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volu ...

Henri Bergson Henri-Louis Bergson (; 18 October 1859 – 4 January 1941) was a French philosopherHenri Bergson. 2014. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved 13 August 2014, from https://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/61856/Henri-Bergson

and

Elizabeth Grosz Elizabeth A. Grosz (born 1952 in Sydney, Australia) is an Australian philosopher, feminist theorist, and professor working in the U.S. She is Jean Fox O'Barr Women's Studies Professor at Duke University. She has written on 20th-century French p ...

, her work conveys multiple, proliferating views and a cinema-like temporality.Sozanski, Edward J
Review
''The Philadelphia Inquirer'', February 8, 2009. Retrieved August 21, 2020. She draws on personal history, art and poetry, news events and collective experiences for imagery; her early work was more personally focused, while since the mid-2000s, she has linked the personal with public and geopolitical issues such as the nature of violence and hatred, tragedy, terrorism and war, and the environment. Schulz's drawings evolve intuitively, often beginning with ideas from reading, which she develops in sketchbooks before rendering small sections of an image at length, often without a predetermined plan. Her delicate charcoal drawing technique has been noted by ''New York Times'' critic Benjamin Genocchio, among others, for its close observation and painstaking detail, heightened level of finish, and control of the medium's capabilities.Wilson, Beth
"Drawn Together,"
''Chronogram'', February 2008, p. 40–1. 2008. Retrieved August 17, 2020.Jordan, Courtney
"Drawing Rooms,"
''Smithsonian Magazine'', March 10, 2008. Retrieved August 21, 2020.

Early paintings

Schulz's early oil paintings arose out of the dislocation she felt following her parents' divorce and move to the alien suburban sprawl and tropical life of Florida. These large works explore memories, charged emotions and relationship to place, using a recurrent, intimate metaphor of a house set in suburban landscapes to represent the human psyche. In an effort to break from a single perspective format, Schulz reshaped styles and spatial treatments of the past—drawing on sources from Cezanne,

Cubism Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassemble ...

and Giorgio de Chirico to traditional Chinese landscape painting and the early Renaissance (e.g., Giotto)—to create personal, contemporary statements. They employ subtle shifts between maze-like interiors and suburban scenes to create fictionalized, cinema-like narratives, informed in part by her reading of Bachelard's phenomenological work '' The Poetics of Space''. Curator Henry Geldzahler wrote that multi-view paintings like ''A Room of My Own'' suggest the complex ways we experience architecture through "an original amalgam of aspects of

Futurism Futurism ( it, Futurismo, link=no) was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy, and to a lesser extent in other countries, in the early 20th century. It emphasized dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such ...

and American

Surrealism Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to l ...

." Other critics compared Schulz's stairways leading nowhere, unexpected doors and dreamlike, tilted rooms—in that work and others, such as ''Persephone's House With a Chimney'' (1995)—to the psychological architectures of 18th-century Italian visionary Giovanni Battista Piranesi's fantastical ''Carceri'' prison etchings.

Early drawings (1999–2005)

In the late 1990s, Schulz moved to Boston (and subsequently, Brooklyn). Finding herself in a crowded urban setting, with less workspace, she turned to modest-sized, single-sheet drawings made in charcoal that, while still personal, were also informed by imagery drawn from poets such as Wallace Stevens and Robert Kelly, philosophy and psychology.Charlotte Schulz website
Early Drawings
Retrieved August 21, 2020. She relinquished the need to start with a structuring house image, instead taking an approach that upended seemingly fixed, opposed constructs like inside and outside, influenced by the fluid, non-Cartesian conception of space and events posited in Deleuze's '' The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque''.Nahas, Dominique. "Timeless/Timeliness," ''Timeless/Timeliness: Aljira Emerge 2003'', Newark, NJ: Aljira: A Center for Contemporary Art, 2004.Larsen, Mernet. ''Dark Poets'', Baltimore, MD: Maryland Institute College of Art, 2007. These ideas were compatible with her interest in portraying shifts in thought and emotion, mysterious and portentous narratives, and movement in time rather than static scenes; the resulting works, including her "Inside the Monad" series, synthesize landscape, architecture, interiors, objects and weather elements. Critic Dominique Nahas described such drawings (e.g., ''With head shorn, she listens to the sleeper sleeping away the dream and dreaming the lives of acquired wisdom'', 2002), as delicately detailed, intensely private, charged vignettes and "incantatory revelations" that "suggest the flitting of intertwined memories."

Mature drawings (2005– )

Beginning in 2005, Schulz shifted to large-scale, intricate charcoal drawings composed of multiple sheets that she often tore, folded, bent and distressed, reshaping and disrupting the picture plane.Stein, Lynn and Daly Flanagan. ''7: Out of this World'', Nyack, NY: Rockland Center for the Arts, 2008. These black-and-white works drew on diverse imagery and extensive reading, and increasingly, linked personal experience to collective, often-traumatic experiences, such as 9-11,

Hurricane Katrina Hurricane Katrina was a destructive Category 5 Atlantic hurricane that caused over 1,800 fatalities and $125 billion in damage in late August 2005, especially in the city of New Orleans and the surrounding areas. It was at the time the cost ...

, and the

assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr., an African-American clergyman and civil rights leader, was fatally shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, at 6:01 p.m. CST. He was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital, where he died at 7 ...

They employ a careful blending of charcoal and delicate erasure that interweaves vignettes of haunted landscapes and elegant interiors intruded upon by war and natural disasters amid the folded terrain, low relief and untouched voids of the paper.Kozul, Zeljka Himbele. ''Shift and Flow'', Long Island City, NY: Dorsky Gallery, 2011. Schulz's surfaces function like screens onto which she projects and layers beliefs, emotions, and potential realities or parallel worlds to form purposefully disjointed narratives that suggest a contemporary psychological index; the language poetry-like titles she composes mirror the juxtaposition of visual elements. A 2010 ''Village Voice'' review describes her work as conveying complex moods moving between comfort and fear rather than clearly delineated narratives, and counts it among a "renaissance in the realm of the fantastical" for realist drawing. Formally, these later drawings explore tensions between real and illusionist space and the sculptural potential of paper, often taking on non-rectangular, object-like configurations that suggest physical, dynamic forces at play. Schulz created the eight-panel drawing ''The Maximum of All Possible Hate Is Realized and We Cleave to Our Screens as It Unfolds in That Disquieting Way'' (2005) in response to the 9/11 attacks.Charlotte Schulz website
''The Maximum of All Possible Hate'' 2004-2005
Retrieved August 21, 2020. Its sheets are arranged on the wall like dominoes (or story panels) and depict incongruous imagery: an airplane flying through a room, everyday domestic elements, explosions, scenes of passage and escape, a sheep on a platform. John Parks of ''Drawing'' describes it as "a potent and thoughtful reflection on how public events intrude on and redefine our private lives, and conversely, how our private lives intrude on and redefine history," also noting its ability to convey connections and correspondences unavailable to a simple linear narrative. In Schulz's shows "An Insufficiency in Our Screens" (Aldrich Museum, 2007; Mills College, 2008) and "The Uneven Intensities of Duration" (2010, Smack Mellon; Wake Forest), the softer blending and merging of imagery in her earlier work gave way to razor-sharp detail, maximum contrast, and more dramatic, disruptive folds in her surfaces.Charlotte Schulz website
Drawings
Retrieved August 21, 2020. These individual and multi-sheet drawings feature abandoned landscapes shot through with billowing darkness and light, dislocated interiors, and unexpected juxtapositions of size (tiny figures, vast spaces), non-sequiturs, symbols and collective memory (e.g., ''Suspended in the Midst of a Flood the Past Carries Itself into a Current Location and Pressures a Rescue from Geographical Forces'', 2010).Trummer, Thomas. "Look, look again," ''Charlotte Schulz: An Insufficiency in Our Screens'', Ridgefield, CT: The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2008.Sutton, Benjamin
"Labryrinths of the Eye,"
''The L Magazine'', October 11, 2010. Retrieved August 17, 2020. Reviews characterize this work as pristine and unsettling, photographically precise, and radically unstable like "optical obstacle courses"; Bay Area critic DeWitt Cheng describes Schulz's depiction of space as "episodic and contradictory, and impossible to grasp as a totality ��fractured, like our consciousness." In her "The Impossibility of Keeping Borders" (2011–2) and "Incursion of Otherness" (2013–4) series, Schulz explored crinkled textures and torn, irregular edges to a greater degree, while continuing to address historic upheavals like the Arab Spring through puzzling juxtapositions of desolate landscapes, buildings with semi-transparent walls, and elements such as miniature rowboats, beds, and penguins. Her "Territory of Significance" (2015–6), "Groundlessness" (2017–8) and "Voyage" (2018–9) series increasingly suggest maps, both through their irregular, continent-like shapes and mash-ups of deconstructed, varied terrains and settings spilling over and growing out of folds and bends in the paper.Voeller, Meagan
"Spatial engagement – 'Poetics of Space' at Dunedin Fine Art Center,"
''Creative Loafing'', July 23, 2015. Retrieved August 17, 2020.Bennett, Lennie
"Review: Word to the wise: Dunedin Fine Art Center holds summer intrigue,"
''Tampa Bay Times'', August 1, 2014. Retrieved August 17, 2020.Himbele, Zeljka. ''At Sea'', Long Island City, NY: Dorsky Gallery, 2019. Works such as ''An Early Map with No One to Say When the Ocean Begins'' or ''Traversing an Open Interior'' (both 2017) feature archaeological, geological and life forms seen from above suggesting timeless societal, environmental and internal processes taking place in a divided world.

Later paintings

After a long hiatus from painting, Schulz returned to it in 2012, incorporating insights gained from her charcoal drawings, while returning to the house motif of earlier work. Like her drawings, these paintings (e.g., ''Within a Great Wind a Vista Opens Up'', 2016, from her "Becoming Nomadic" series) make connections between disparate images—some culled from Renaissance art, others contemporary—while using the house as an intermediary between inside, outside and a world in flux.Charlotte Schulz website
Paintings
Retrieved August 21, 2020.

Awards and public collections

Schulz has been recognized with fellowships from the

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded in 1925 by Olga and Simon Guggenheim in memory of their son, who died on April 26, 1922. The organization awards Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been ...

(2010), New York Foundation for the Arts (2017, 2009, 2001), the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (2013),Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts
Charlotte Schulz
EFA Studio Program, Artists. Retrieved August 21, 2020. Aljira Center for Contemporary Art (2002), the State of Florida (1996) and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1992), and a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2005). Her work belongs to the permanent public collections of the Mills College Museum of Art, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, and University of South Florida, among others.Mills College Museum of Art
Charlotte Schulz, ''An Insufficiency in Our Screens: Our Hurt Sang Back to MLK When the Incompossible Appeared'', 2006
Collection. Retrieved August 17, 2020.