Judith Simonian is an American artist known for her montage-like paintings and early urban public art.Garwood, Deborah
"Resplendent: Judith Simonian at Edward Thorp"
''Artcritical'', April 4, 2015. Retrieved April 13, 2020.McAdams, Shane
"Judy Simonian"
''The Brooklyn Rail'', December 2005–January 2006. Retrieved April 14, 2020.Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter
"Transitional Use: A Suburban Exhibition"
''Art and Architecture'', March 1984, p. 15–6.Cotter, Holland

''The New York Times'', August 26, 1996, p. C1. Retrieved April 14, 2020. She began her career as a significant participant in an emergent 1980s downtown Los Angeles art scene that spawned street art and performances, galleries and institutions such as Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA), before moving to New York City in 1985.Muchnic, Suzanne. "Creativity Transforms Century Freeway Ruins," ''Los Angeles Times'', September 4, 1982.Mahoney, Robert. "Judith Simonian frames tired old New York with a newcomer's excitement," ''New York Press'', March 24, 1989. In her first decade of work, Simonian created site-specific installations and public projects for MoMA PS1, Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) and

Creative Time Creative Time is a New York-based nonprofit arts organization. It was founded in 1974 to support the creation of innovative, site-specific, socially engaged artworks in the public realm, particularly in vacant spaces of historical and architectura ...

, among others, that intervened in or transformed deteriorating urban sites.Norklun, Kathy. ''Judith Simonian'', Newport Beach, CA: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1984.Richard, Paul
"The guerillas of art"
''Washington Post'', Style, March 24, 1981. Through that work's emphasis on strategies of juxtaposition and disjuncture, she developed a language that has informed her work for three decades after a shift to painting. ''Artcriticals Deborah Garwood describes Simonian’s paintings as intuitive works which "knit luscious pictorial fields that tease cognition and the senses" and suggest the mind's "contradictory resilience and fallibility" in grasping contemporary existence. Simonian has exhibited paintings and mixed-media works internationally, in numerous gallery shows, and at The New Museum,

San Francisco Museum of Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern art, modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary a ...

, and

Newport Harbor Art Museum The Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located on the campus of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California. The museum's collection comprises more than 4,500 objects, with a concentration o ...

(now Orange County Museum of Art/OCMA).Albright, Thomas. "Fresh Paint," ''ARTnews'', September 1982.Larsen, Susan C. "First Newport Biennial," ''ARTnews'', February, 1985.Edward Thorp Gallery. ''Judith Simonian, Foreign Bodies'', New York: Edward Thorp Gallery, 2015. She has received 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 ...

Gottlieb Foundation The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation was established in 1976. It is an American nonprofit organization that provides funding for the arts. History The Gottlieb Foundation was established after Adolph Gottlieb’s death in 1974. Esther Gottlie ...

grants, and National Endowment for the Arts awards; her art belongs to institutions such as the

Hammer Museum The Hammer Museum, which is affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles, is an art museum and cultural center known for its artist-centric and progressive array of exhibitions and public programs. Founded in 1990 by the entrepreneur- ...

Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (or MCASD), in San Diego, California, US, is an art museum focused on the collection, preservation, exhibition, and interpretation of works of art from 1950 to the present. Mission The stated mission ...

, OCMA, Broad Art Foundation, and

Fresno Art Museum The Fresno Art Museum is an art museum in Fresno, California. The museum's collection includes contemporary art, modern art, Mexican and Mexican-American art, and Pre-Columbian sculpture. Mission Statement "The Fresno Art Museum offers a dynami ...

.''Artforum''
"2014 Guggenheim Fellows Announced"
News, April 10, 2014. Retrieved April 13, 2020.''Artforum''
"Inaugural Recipients of BRIC’s $100,000 Colene Brown Art Prize Announced"
News, October 2, 2019. Retrieved April 13, 2020.Samuelian, Janet. "Judith Simonian Displays Current Art Works," ''The Armenian Reporter International'', January 7, 1995. She lives and works in the East Village in Manhattan and teaches at The

Cooper Union The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (Cooper Union) is a private college at Cooper Square in New York City. Peter Cooper founded the institution in 1859 after learning about the government-supported École Polytechnique in ...

.The Cooper Union
''Judith Simonian"''
People. Retrieved April 14, 2020.

Early life and career

Simonian was born and raised in Los Angeles. She studied art at

California State University, Northridge California State University, Northridge (CSUN or Cal State Northridge) is a public university in the Northridge neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. With a total enrollment of 38,551 students (as of Fall 2021), it has the second largest un ...

, earning BA (1967) and MA (1974) degrees. Soon after graduating, she was invited to join Grandview Galleries, which became the early feminist art collective Double X; based in the Woman's Building in downtown Los Angeles, its members included

Nancy Buchanan Nancy Buchanan (born August 30, 1946) is a Los Angeles-based artist best known for her work in installation, performance, and video art. She played a central role in the feminist art movement in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Her work has been exhib ...

, Judy Chicago,

Merion Estes Merion Estes (born Salt Lake City, Utah on 5 September 1938) is a Los Angeles-based painter. She earned a B.F.A. at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, and an M.F.A. at the University of Colorado, in Boulder. Estes was raised in ...

, Barbara Smith and

Faith Wilding Faith Wilding (born 1943) is a Paraguayan American multidisciplinary artist - which includes but is not limited to: watercolor, performance art, writing, crocheting, knitting, weaving, and digital art. She is also an author, educator, and activ ...

.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
"Judith Simonian"
Fellows. Retrieved April 13, 2020.Tree of Life
"Judith Simonian"
Grantees. Retrieved April 13, 2020. Simonian divided her early work between site-specific, largely temporary (and sometimes guerilla) works and painting. She gained critical recognition for projects and commissions from the California Confederation of the Arts, Santa Barbara Museum of Art,

Madison Art Center The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA), formerly known as the Madison Art Center, is an independent, non-profit art museum located in downtown Madison, Wisconsin. MMoCA is dedicated to exhibiting, collecting, and preserving modern and ...

, WPA and MoMA PS1,Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art. ''Urban Alterations'', Los Angeles: Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art, 1979. and painting exhibitions at the Ovsey (Los Angeles), Rena Bransten (San Francisco), Leila Taghinia Milani and Jayne Baum (New York), and Peter Miller (Chicago) galleries.Curtis, Cathy
"Layers of Imagery"
''Los Angeles Times'', February 16, 1990. Retrieved April 13, 2020.Artner, Alan G. "Rick Harlow, Mark Schwartz, Judith Simonian," ''Chicago Tribune'', March 9, 1984. She was also featured in shows at the San Francisco Museum of Art and Fresno Art Museum, as well as the inaugural Newport Biennial (OCMA).Knight, Christopher. "It’s Art, Plain and Simple at Newport," ''Los Angeles Herald Examiner'', October 28, 1984. Since relocating to New York, Simonian has exhibited at The New Museum, the London Biennale (2000), Weatherspoon Art Museum, and in solo exhibitions at the Edward Thorp, John Davis and Janet Kurnatowski galleries (New York) and Kai Hilgerman Gallery (Berlin), among others.Mahoney, Robert. "Art on The Beach," ''Arts Magazine'', November 1988. She has taught at The Cooper Union since 1995, in addition to several other institutions.

Work and reception

Simonian has produced two seemingly divergent bodies of work—montage-like paintings that mix diverse imagery and styles and temporary street/public art projects.Kohler, William Eckhardt
"Judith Simonian at Ed Thorp - Apocalyptic Comfort"
''HuffPost'', May 15, 2013. Retrieved April 14, 2020. Both bodies are rooted in assemblage strategies and an intuitive working process that begins with recognizable elements, which she alters through addition, effacement or abstraction; they juxtapose disparate contexts to create formal and cognitive tension and enigmatic, almost archaeological narratives.Devlin, Elizabeth
"Highlights From Armory Week"
''New America Paintings'', 2014. Retrieved April 13, 2020.Garwood, Deborah
"Judy Simonian: Chronic Civilization"
''Artcritical'', January 1, 2006. Retrieved April 14, 2020. The paintings depict shifting, dream-like spaces and objects that intrude on and dissolve into one another, while her outdoor works have places minimalist-art vocabularies in dialogue with street art.List, Larry
Majesty at The Brink of Chaos"
''Live Mag!'', June 10, 2013. Retrieved April 13, 2020.Stevenson, Jonathan

''Two Coats of Paint'', June 5, 2018. Retrieved April 14, 2020.

Site-specific projects (1978–96)

Much of Simonian's early work (like her Los Angeles contemporaries,

Maura Sheehan Maura Sheehan is an American installation artist and sculptor who works with unconventional materials. She is on the faculty of the BFA Fine Arts Department, School of Visual Arts New York., and the founder and director of the Manhattan Art Program ...

and Jon Peterson) centered on unpermitted, temporary works at graffitied, decaying urban spaces or public commissions.Ross, Richard. "At Large In Santa Barbara," L.A.I.C.A. Journal, September—October 1980. p. 45–47.Mallinson, Constance. "Encountering the Sublime – The Art of Jon Peterson," ''Jon Peterson Paintings and Sculpture: A Survey'', Pamela Wilson (ed), Los Angeles: LA Artcore, 2013. She transformed several sites by sandblasting, excavating or painting out selected areas in order to create unexpected juxtapositions and to provoke dialogue and alterations, often made in distinctly different visual vocabularies. She documented their evolution in photographs over time, discovering in the process a collage-like language that continues to inform her painting. For ''Modern Excavation'' (PS1, 1984), she sandblasted a grid-like checkerboard pattern through thick peeling layers of paint, excavating the history of the site's building. Her wall work for the WPA "Streetworks" show (1983) was painted on the ruin of a market torched during the

1968 riots 1968 riots may refer to: * Orangeburg massacre, February 8, South Carolina State University, Orangeburg, South Carolina * King assassination riots, April and May, across the United States, including: ** 1968 Washington, D.C., riots, April 4–8, ...

; the ''Washington Post'' described it as a thoughtful, "beautiful and modest" piece of urban archaeology. In other cases, Simonian added elements to sites.Garris, Laurie
"The MacArthur Park Program"
''Arts + Architecture'', July 1985, p. 16–7. Retrieved April 24, 2020.McMillan, Penelope

''Los Angeles Times'', November 4, 1985. Retrieved April 24, 2020.Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter. "Someone Left the Art Out In the Park," ''Los Angeles Herald Examiner'', November 1, 1985. Her installation for Creative Time's "Art on The Beach" program, ''Villa San Itta'' (1988), featured a cast concrete Palladian façade suggesting an architectural ruin that surprised visitors by disguising and giving entry to portable toilets attached at the backside. ''Talkin' Trash'' ( SculptureCenter commission, 1996,

Long Island University Long Island University (LIU) is a private university with two main campuses, LIU Post and LIU Brooklyn, in the U.S. state of New York. It offers more than 500 academic programs at its main campuses, online, and at multiple non-residential. LIU ...

) linked two trash cans at opposite sides of a main plaza with hidden, buried speaking tubes; ''New York Times'' critic Holland Cotter wrote that the "low-tech, radically anti-monumental" work rewarded visitors with an intimacy rare for public art.

Early painting

Simonian's early gallery work came full circle from outdoor wall paintings to paintings constructed like walls that share the archaeological, process-oriented concerns of her street work.Berland, Dinah. "Judith Simonian," ''ArtScene'', May 1988, p. 23–4. Her "Reconstructions" were formed by piecing together retrieved chunks of drywall from previous, now-vandalized urban interventions, tile and other building materials; writers compare their reclaimed, painted surfaces to topographic relief maps.Rubin, David. "Judith Simonian at Ovsey," ''Art in America'', October 1983, p. 194–5. These works borrow from exotic and classical traditions, often depicting landscape and water subjects, including whirling vessels, fountains, waterfalls, whirlpools and streams (e.g., ''Pots at the Falls'', 1982 or ''Fire of the Falls'', 1983). ''Art in Americas David Rubin and others highlight the imagery's abstraction and ambiguity, which encourages multiple symbolic readings suggesting female, orgasmic, life-giving, or uncontrollable forces in the self and universe.Liss, Andrea. "Uses of The Past," ''Artweek'', 1986. After moving to New York in 1985, Simonian shifted toward more reflective, urban meditations that express feelings and observations—romance, decadence and shabbiness, modernist claustrophobia—about her environment rather than illustrate it.Muchnic, Suzanne
"Galleries: Wilshire Center”
''Los Angeles Times'', April 25, 1986. Retrieved April 14, 2020.Donahue, Marlena

''Los Angeles Times'', April 29, 1988. Retrieved April 13, 2020.Knight, Christopher. “Painter Relocates Landscapes,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, May 13, 1988. The paintings offer tactile, often aerial, views through what

Suzanne Muchnic Suzanne Muchnic (born 1940) is an art writer who was a staff art reporter and art critic at the ''Los Angeles Times'' for 31 years. She has also written books on artists, collectors, and museums. Academic career Muchnic is a graduate of Scripp ...

calls "a veil of mysticism," composed of hazy curtains of color, shafts of light, louvered blinds and ornate grillwork.Andreoli-Woods, Lynn. "And Now, Substance," ''The Reader'' (Los Angeles), March 9, 1990. They maintain Simonian's mixed-media approach, often using mosaic tiles to further dualities between interior and exterior (e.g., ''El Capitan''), decorative and pictorial, and abstract and illusionistic; critics compare the effect to Mondrian’s transformation of natural imagery into patterns of squares and Bonnard's collapse of indoor and outdoor. For a 1994 conceptual show at Ovsey Gallery, Simonian turned to the human figure. She recreated

Balthus Balthasar Klossowski de Rola (February 29, 1908 – February 18, 2001), known as Balthus, was a Polish-French modern artist. He is known for his erotically charged images of pubescent girls, but also for the refined, dreamlike quality of his image ...

's controversial paintings of young girls on the flip sides of white panels with peepholes that she suspended several feet in front of mirrored walls; visitors peering through found the girls' faces replaced with their own, implicating them as voyeur and viewed object, fantasist and victim.Kandel, Susan
"Gender Talk"
''Los Angeles Times'', March 11, 1994. Retrieved April 14, 2020. ''Los Angeles Times'' critic

Susan Kandel Susan Kandel is an American author of a series of mystery books set in Los Angeles featuring sleuth CeCe Caruso, a vintage clothing fashionista and biographer of mystery writers. Kandel's background is in art history Art history is the study ...

called it a deft reversal of gendered positions that upended critical commonplaces about the male gaze. In later series, Simonian drew on advertising, newspaper and snapshot images to piece together large-scale, fragmented portraits textured by washes and aggressive mark-making, that play individuality against a composite or fractured sense of selfhood.Cotter, Holland
"For Hikers Seeking Art, Brooklyn Is a Left Bank"
''The New York Times'', December 15, 2000. Retrieved April 14, 2020.Youens, Rachel
"The Local Scene"
''The Brooklyn Rail'', December 2000–January 2001. Retrieved April 14, 2020.

Painting – 2000s

In the 2000s, Simonian returned to architectural sources, ranging from medieval dungeons and ancient arenas to cavernous nightclub and office spaces. Critics note this work for its mix of incongruous subjects and disparate styles, sense of light and space, and palpable atmosphere, captured efficiently in loose, shorthand-like brushwork, saturated watercolor washes and built up surfaces.Maine, Stephen. "What Belongs Where," ''Judith Simonian'', New York: Edward Thorp Gallery, 2011. Reviewing Simonian's suite of watercolor collages, "Chronic Civilization" (Janet Kurnatowski, 2006), Shane McAdams highlighted ''Red Coliseum'' for its foregrounded, gauzy paper strips opening like windows into vague space and its vertical swaths of wet scarlet and lavender, which he compared to Morris Louis "Veil" paintings. Deborah Garwood singled out the claustrophobic ambiance of ''Deep Purple Space'' for its dense play of gesture, stenciling, texture and shadow. Writers contend that Simonian's later work ventures into more ambitious territory, broadly mixing imagery, styles and approaches in spatial conundrums that push pictorial space and cognition to near-collapse. In these paintings, she delves further into montage (literal and painted), knitting together abstract passages, still lifes, domestic interiors, structures and travel scenes with dissolving, shifting boundaries.Butler, Sharon
"A Day in New York"
''Two Coats of Paint'', May 20, 2013. Retrieved April 14, 2020.Markell, Eliot. "Judith Simonian, Recent Work at Ed Thorp," ''White Elephant on Wheels'', June 15, 2013. For example, ''Mountain with Flags'' (2012), ''Ski Lift'' (2013) and ''Ferry Boat'' (2018) feature curtains of color slathered over idyllic landscapes punctured by breaks, holes, ruptures or collaged shards; ''Huffington Post'' suggests that the disjunctures of natural and man-made, sublime and banal invite uneasy thoughts about hubris and romantic idealism, spiritual tourism and ecological degradation. In her 2015 show, '"Foreign Bodies," the painting ''Lounge Chairs'' (2014) demonstrates Simonian's simultaneously embodiment of abstraction and illusion; it evokes a humid environment of plant life and water through an economy of marks and swaths of color. The larger ''Snow Cone'' (2014) blends coherent space and spatial disruption, juxtaposing a central frosted cake wedge, a bright, rough-textured yellow background casting an optical-illusion shadow, and punning allusions to collage strategies ("slice," "layers").Humphrey, David and Jennifer Coates. "Search Party," ''Judith Simonian, Foreign Bodies'', New York: Edward Thorp Gallery, 2015. Critics compare the contrasts of context and content of these image shards and pictures-within-a-picture to jump-cuts in film or dream imagery; Larry List writes that Simonian's "tough compositional and color decisions result in works with a rugged, feral beauty hatescape the trap of any sort of conventional resolution."

Awards and collections

Simonian has been recognized with a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2014), BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize (2019), and grants from Tree of Life (2017), the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (2006, 2000), National Endowment for the Arts (1990), and California Confederation of the Arts ( CETA grant, 1978). She has been awarded residencies by the BAU Institute (Cassis, France),BAU Institute
BAU Institute Fellows And Participants
Retrieved April 20, 2020.

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), is an art museum located in the Houston Museum District of Houston, Texas. With the recent completion of an eight-year campus redevelopment project, including the opening of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Build ...

/ Dora Maar House (Ménerbes, France),Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Past Fellows at the Dora Maar House
Cora and Dora Mar Fellowships. Retrieved April 24, 2020. Yaddo,Yaddo
Visual Artists
Retrieved April 20, 2020. and MacDowell Colony,MacDowell Colony
Judith Simonian
Artists. Retrieved April 24, 2020. among others. Her work belongs to the public collections of the Hammer Museum, Broad Art Foundation, Fresno Art Museum, Laguna Art Museum, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, OCMA, and several universities and corporations.Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
Judith Simonian
Artist. Retrieved April 20, 2020.

References

External links

Judith Simonian
official website

Gorky's Daughter, November 2016 video interview
Judith Simonian
artist page, Edward Thorp Gallery {{DEFAULTSORT:Simonian, Judith Living people 21st-century American painters American women painters Artists from Los Angeles Painters from New York City Street artists California State University, Northridge alumni Cooper Union faculty Year of birth missing (living people) 21st-century American women artists