“Creating is a process; it should be done for joy,” artist Rita Blitt instructed Hyperallergic in a latest video interview from her part-time studio house in Berkeley, California.
With a dynamic apply spanning 9 full a long time and mediums together with portray, drawing, movie, and sculpture, the Summary Expressionist artist has definitely discovered greater than only a factor or two about forging a complete oeuvre. Initially from Kansas Metropolis, Missouri, the place she spends her time when she shouldn’t be in California together with her daughter, Blitt has devoted her life to being an artist. Her 1000’s of works embody large-scale public sculptures completely put in throughout her hometown and as distant as Singapore and Australia; quick movies and documentaries merging her artwork apply with music and dance; and emotive work held in museum collections and personal establishments globally, together with the Skirball Cultural Heart in Los Angeles, the Nationwide Museum of Singapore, the Nevada Museum of Artwork, the Spencer Museum of Artwork, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Artwork, the Kemper Museum of Modern Artwork, and the Mulvane Artwork Museum at Washburn College.
Rita Blitt, “Field of Glory” (2002), acrylic on canvas
A lot of Blitt’s artwork has drawn inspiration from her relations, together with her granddaughter and late husband, the pure setting, and the work of longtime collaborators resembling choreographer David Parsons and composer Michael Udow. However her largest and longest operating affect is dance, which has been elementary to her creative identification since she was a toddler, when she would hint poetic figures onto frosted home windows together with her fingers and fill “ any piece of white space” she might discover together with her imaginative illustrations. To this present day, her course of of creating artwork is filled with motion and sweeping gestures created together with her arms and physique, akin to that of a conductor main an orchestra.
On the Mulvane Artwork Museum, which holds greater than 2,000 works by Blitt and has devoted a gallery house in her identify, a number of of her items are at the moment on view within the exhibition Ladies of Summary Expressionism, up via February. The present situates her lifelong artwork apply in dialogue with that of mid-Twentieth century Summary Expressionist artists Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell, arguably family names of post-war artwork historical past in the USA.
Rita Blitt, “Finding Center” (1983) from Oval, oil on canvas
Set up view of Helen Frankenthaler’s “Wind Directions” (1970) (left) and Rita Blitt’s “Untitled” from Dividing the Rectangle (1976) (proper)
“I’ve known Rita quite a while now, and I’ve spent a lot of time with her work, but every time I look at it, I learn something new or I experience something new, so it’s been a bit of a journey,” Mulvane Artwork Museum Director Connie Gibbons, who curated Ladies of Summary Expressionism, instructed Hyperallergic.
Gibbons defined that she learn Mary Gabriel’s 2018 e book Ninth Road Ladies, which delves into the works of Krasner, de Kooning, Mitchell, Frankenthaler, and Grace Hartigan, ladies painters whose contributions had been traditionally overshadowed by these of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, and different male artists.
The curator acknowledged commonalities between their practices and Blitt’s, who as a Midwestern artist “was doing a very similar thing … often in isolation” from New York Metropolis’s buzzing neighborhood.
Now in her 90s, Blitt continues to be creating work, discovering inspiration on daily basis. Her newest work, which function a mixing of coloration and flowing shapes on canvas, revisit her lifelong love for bushes.
“Someone once said that an artwork isn’t finished until it’s viewed by others,” Blitt instructed Hyperallergic. “Perhaps that’s true, but sometimes it’s hard to share everything. People say, ‘Oh, [art] has to look like this, or it has to look like that.’ But I want them to know it’s about the joy of creating and having the courage to listen to their inner being.”
Rita Blitt, “Aspen Dawn” from Anticipation – Celebration (1996-97), acrylic on canvas
“Untitled” (1997), acrylic on paper
Set up view of (left) Rita Blitt’s “Untitled” (2002) and (proper) Elaine de Kooning’s “On the Way to San Remo” (1967)