Note: The author is indebted to Bard’s press department and Hollis Barhart, as well as exhibition curator, Douglas Dodds, for permission to borrow liberally from gallery and catalogue material for the completion of this review.

Barbara Nessim: An Artful Life at the Bard Graduate Gallery of Art, in New York City, presents an overview of the work of this pioneering American artist and designer from the 1960s to the present day. Nessim’s distinctive illustrations have appeared on the covers of nearly every major American magazine, including Time, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times Magazine. Her work ranges from provocative prints, drawings, and paintings that represent her feminist views to illustrations for advertising cam­paigns for companies such as Levi’s and Ralph Lauren. She employs a wide variety of techniques, including line drawing, watercolor, printmaking, photography, and col­lage. In a career that spans more than fifty years, she is still actively working on new projects.

Above, left: “Beware of the Blue Sky Syndrome” (1967), pen and Ink, watercolor, collage. Courtesy of the artist. xxxxxx

Barbara Nessim: An Artful Life is curated by Douglas Dodds, Senior Curator in the Word and Image Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. This exhibition, organized by the Bard Graduate Center, New York City, expands the 2013 presentation in the V&A’s Twentieth Century gallery.

Right: “Superman Carrying Girl with Green Shoes,” from the series “Coney Island in the Winter” (1963). Monotype etching; hand-colored with oil. Victoria & Albert Museum, E.11-2013.

Beginnings

Born in the Bronx, Barbara Nessim studied at New York’s School of Industrial Art (now the High School of Art and Design) and attended Pratt Institute from 1956 to 1960. Her mother, a blouse designer, supported her daughter’s efforts to obtain an art education and become a commercial artist. Nessim majored in graphic art and illustration at Pratt, where her teachers were art­ists and illustrators such as Richard Lindner and Robert Weaver. Friends and professional colleagues included prominent designers and art directors such as Milton Glaser, Henry Wolf, Robert Benton, Seymour Chwast, and Bob Gill.

Nessim’s early paintings, drawings, and etchings pro­vide an introduction to many of the techniques, icono­graphic devices, and preoccupations that inform much of her later work. She has also maintained a series of unique sketchbooks from the 1960s to the present day, and these provide an invaluable source of inspiration for other projects. Sketchbooks are displayed through­out the exhibition to reinforce their central role in Nessim’s artistic practice.

Nessim’s art began to receive recognition in the early 1960s, when she won an award for the Man and Machine series of etchings. She worked as a textile designer but also provided illustrations for various men’s magazines, creating powerful images such as Superman Carrying Girl with Green Shoes (1963). At the time, she was one of only a few women working as a professional illustrator for mainstream publications such as Harper’s Bazaar and Redbook, which provided her much-needed income at the time.

Left: “Woman Thinking Blue at a Party” (1966). Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.

During the 1960s and 70s, her imagery reflected the changing role of women in society. In 1982, Nessim was artist-in-residence at Time Inc.’s Video Information Services where she taught herself how to use and make art on the computer. Since then, computers have played a major role in her work. Nessim has taught in the MFA Computer Arts Program at the School of Visual Arts and in the Illustration Department at Parsons, The New School for Design, where she was chair from 1992 to 2004. The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts named her its first Artist Laureate in 2009.

1960s: Word and Image

Visitors to the exhibition will first encounter Star Girl Banded with Blue Wave (1966). Commissioned for George Beylerian’s Scarabaeus home furnishing store in New York City, Barbara Nessim’s Star Girl refers to Wonder Woman, the American comic superhero who became a feminist icon. From 1962 to 1968 Nessim shared an apartment with Gloria Steinem, who went on to become a leader in the women’s movement, and Steinem subse­quently used an image of Wonder Woman on the cover of the first independent issue of Ms. Magazine in 1972.

Right: “Festival of the Face in Four Cubes” (1967), pen and ink, watercolor on paper. Courtesy of the artist. 

In the late 1960s, Nessim created a number of oil paint­ings depicting female heads, with such titles as Woman Thinking Blue at a Party and Woman with Mask. The images exist within defined borders, some reminiscent of early Italian Renaissance portraits.

Nessim also made a series of vibrant watercolors with equally enigmatic titles, including Beware of the Blue Sky Syndrome and Periscope Vision Isn’t Everything. Works such as Blue Hair, Block Eyes, Cube Cheeks, and Striped Lips, Now! seek to explore women’s engagement with contemporary fashion, or what Nessim calls “aspects of the female social mask.” Man Looking at Woman Dancing or Three’s a Crowd, for example, examine interpersonal relationships. Some watercolors were made for friends, including Gloria Steinem, Ali MacGraw, and Milton and Shirley Glaser, but most were simply inspired by Nessim’s acute interest in people, fashion, and culture.

Left: “Candy,” from Nugget magazine, September 1964. Courtesy of the artist.

1970s: WomanGirls

By the early 1970s, Nessim’s paintings and watercolors were generally softer and more delicate than the vibrant works she produced in the late 1960s. Although some were completely abstract, others focused on the human form. She created an exquisite—and somewhat ambigu­ous—series of figure drawings she called WomanGirls. The young women in the series seem self-possessed and at the same time rather exposed. Many of the young women stand gracefully on their toes, wearing very little other than ballet shoes. The artist compares the female position to that of the ballet dancer whose seemingly effortless poise conceals the grueling training and disci­pline it takes to sustain the performance.

In 1973 Nessim was asked to illustrate a New York Times article on censorship entitled “For Permissiveness, with Misgivings.” She decided to use a WomanGirl as the basis for the image, scratching out areas of the female figure to emphasize the topic. In addition to work for maga­zines, Nessim was commissioned to create a number of public artworks during the 1970s, including Brideprice for the World Trade center (1975).

Right: Barbara Nessim with “Brideprice,” installed at the World Trade Center observation deck, New York, ca. 1977. Photographed by Seiji Kakizaki. Courtesy of the artist.

1960s and Beyond: Popular Culture

Throughout her career, Nessim has engaged with fashion, music, and other aspects of popular culture’ Fashion designs include the Lady van Tastic range of blouses commissioned for Van Heusen (1965), shoes designs for Garber (1972), and a  costume for the New York premier of the film Ladies and Gentleman: The Rolling Stones (1974). For this costume Nessim employed some of the same features that are evident in the WomanGirl watercolors. Although the model who wore the costume appeared to be almost naked, she was actually wearing a skin-colored leotard.

Footwear features prominently throughout Nessim’s work, which can point to the themes of womanhood, identity, or conspicuous consumption, and is particularly evident in an exquisite series of watercolors crated in the early 1970s that included Fire Engine Heel (1971) and Birdlike Shoe (1974). Some of the footwear designs are whimsical, whereas others are more practical. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Nessim produced a highly distinctive series of images of fantasy shoes, many of which feature the platform sols and flamboyant colors associated with the Glam Rock era.

Left: “Fire Engine Heel” (1971). Pen and ink, watercolor. Victoria & Albert Museum, E.38-2013.

The artist’s links with the music industry are also evident in posters for Dionne Warwick (1969) and Lincoln Center (1976), as well as banners for the 52^nd Street Jazz Festival (1978) and portraits of Joni Mitchell (1979), John Lennon (1988), and David Bowie (2013). She also continued to work for many magazines, including Ms., Harper’s Bazaar, and Viva.

1980s: Computer Art and Graphics

In the early 1980s, Nessim was well established as a professional illustrator, and her hand-drawn artworks often accompanied articles on social issues. In 1982 she produced the cover image for a Time magazine article on women’s rights, just as the Equal Rights Amendment was defeated in three U.S. states.

Nessim became increasingly aware of the potential benefits that computers could bring to her work. She was invited to become artist in residence at Time, where she used the firm’s computer system to create striking images, such as Ode to the Statute of Liberty (1982–84).

Right: “Ode to the Statue of Liberty 2” (1982–84). Cibachrome photograph of computer screen. Courtesy of the artist.

By the mid-1980s, Nessim was using her own Macintosh Plus computer and MacPaint software to create smaller works, such as Woman Contemplating Man in Shadow (1985). She went on to incorporate digital technology into much of her artistic practice, devising ways to create larger and increasingly complex images, exemplified by American Lives (1987) and Thoughts of the Moon (1989).

1990s: RAM and More

Nessim continued to pursue her own artistic practice throughout the 1990s, while she also explored the increasing capabilities of digital technology. Her Random Access Memories exhibition (first presented in a gallery in New York’s SoHo in 1991) featured an Apple computer installation, plus a series of computer-drawn flags and stereoscopic images. In these works, Nessim examined art, technology, national identity, and population growth. She also produced a range of commercial and non-commercial artworks for other organizations. A series of advertisements for Levi’s women’s jeans (1991) rely on the use of elegant line drawings. Other striking examples of the artist’s use of a single line include Breast Cancer at 35 for the New York Times Magazine (1997) and Portrait of Gisele Bündchen for Ralph Lauren (1998).

Left: Sketchbook no. 62, 1994. Pen and ink, watercolor, collage. Courtesy of the artist.

2000s: Digital Collage

In recent years, Nessim has made increasing use of collage in many of her most powerful works, which often employ digital techniques as well. The last section of the exhibition features the original artwork for The Model Project (2009), plus larger digital prints of aluminum, such as Ancient Beauty (2009). Collages for Chronicles of Beauty (20100 are also on view, alongside some of the finished works.

Throughout her career, Barbara Nessim has often reused existing images as inspiration for new work and continued to experiment with large-scale works from much smaller originals. In 2014 she started to create hi-resolution digital prints of images from sketchbooks, many of which incorporate elements of collage. Working on both small and large scale, she retains a fascination with the female form and woman’s place in the world. The prints nevertheless retain the fluency, power, and immediacy that Nessim’s work has always possessed.

Right: “Carnival Heat,” from the series “Chronicles of Beauty” (2010). Digital print on aluminum. Courtesy of the artist.

By Edward Rubin, Contributing Editor

Barbara Nessin; An Artful Life, is on view at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, through January 11, 2015. Lear more at:  http://www.bgc.bard.edu/gallery/gallery-at-bgc/barbara-nessim.html

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, Barbara Nessim: An Artful Life, edited by the art writer and critic David Galloway. Published by Abrams, the book explores her versatile career with essays by a dozen interna­tional authors. Contributors include Roger Black, Elyssa Dimant, Douglas Dodds, Milton Glaser, Cynthia Goodman, Steven Heller, Matthew Israel, Philip Koether, Kiša Lala, Christoph Benjamin Schulz, Gloria Steinem, and Ann Telford. It will be available at the BGC Gallery and through the website http://store.bgc.bard.edu/barbara-nessim-an-artful-life-edited-by-david-galloway/

Left: Exhibition catalogue. On the cover: “Star Girl Banded with Blue Wave” (1966), silk screen on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.

The Bard Graduate Center Gallery is located in New York City at 18 West 86th Street, between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Thursday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Suggested admission is $7 general, $5 seniors.

The Bard Graduate Center is a graduate research institute in New York City. Our Gallery exhibitions and publications, MA and PhD programs, and research initiatives explore new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture. Founded in 1993, the BGC is an academic unit of Bard College.

For information about the Bard Graduate Center and upcoming exhibitions, please visit bgc.bard.edu. For press information and images, please e-mail barnhart@ bgc.bard.edu or call 212-501-3074.

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Author’s After-note: In a departure from the usual exhibition review, I recently had an opportunity to participate in a number of events involving the artist, and some of her well-known friends and confidants. I am including my ‘diary-style’ accounting of some of these important encounters as a way of shedding light on Barbara Nessim’s accomplishments and her broad influence—currently felt— in the worlds of art and modern social politics.

From London to New York: the Artful Life of Barbara Nessim

Last week was all about artist Barbara Nessim, whose retrospective recently viewed at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, where they acquired her groundbreaking work for their permanent collection. It recently opened, in a expanded version, at the Bard Graduate Center, here in New York City. My week started with an amazing 2 hour tour of An Artful Life at the Bard Graduate Center, led by Barbara Nessim, the artist herself. Accompanied by artist and writer Mary Hrbacek, we got to joyously relive the life and career alongside of Ms. Nessim. What a treat!

A couple of days later I attended a conversation between Barbara Nessim and writer, lecturer, editor, and uber feminist, Gloria Steinem, also at the Bard Graduate Center. Roommates in the 1960s, these two independent, creative women – one from East Toledo and one from the Bronx – have been friends for over fifty years.

Left: R-L, Gloria Steinem, Marianne Lamonaca, Associate Gallery Director and Chief Curator, and artist Barbara Nessim, at exhibition seminar.  Photo Credit:  Edward Rubin

This high profile event, with a line of mostly women around the block – Gloria has a big following – sold out in a nanosecond. Everybody wanted a look at Steinem. Luckily for me I was given a press seat in the third row. Of course no good deed goes unpunished and a seven foot tall man sat directly in front of me, and wherever I leaned to get a better view of the speakers, he followed suit. Still, I managed.

The conversation was brilliantly moderated by Marianne Lamonaca Bard Gallery’s Chief Curator and Associate Director who asked the “just perfect” questions, many obviously based on research. Equally important, Lamonaca paid the same amount of attention to both participants. For an hour Gloria and Barbara talked about their lives, the work and life in New York from the `60s to today. They ended their reminiscences with the usual Q & A.

Right: Barbara Nessim at the School of Visual Arts (1986). Photograph: Seiji Kakizaki. Courtesy of the artist.

Steinem, still beautiful at age 80, with her usual intellectual bent and flair for public speaking, knocked me for a loop with several of her pronouncements, as well as her generosity which had her continually redirecting the audience back, and rightly so, to Nessim’s currently running  retrospective, which she seemed to have not only visited at length but memorized while the virtually ageless Ms. Nessim, continually using the word flow (as in “Going with the Flow), regaled us with many anecdotes, each delivered with a genuine goodhearted humor, not unlike the writings of Erma Bombeck.

Below are a couple of Steinem’s utterances, many of which had some audience members nodding in agreement:

“For social justice you need a certain amount of people who can’t be fired.”  What Steinem meant by this statement – a truism in my mind – is that once you commit yourself to a fulltime job at a corporation, and rely on a paycheck, there is only so much you can say or do before getting fired. Needless to say Steinem–who spent most of her life freelancing, as did Barbara Nessim–has a lot to say. During an interview that I conduced with artist and writer Kate Millet – she wrote the groundbreaking book Sexual Politics (1969) – Kate echoing Steinem, gave a similar warning by saying “Beware of the Big Buildings.”

Left: Gloria Steinem, Marianne Lamonaca, Associate Gallery Director and Chief Curator, and artist Barbara Nessim, in conversation with the audience. “Gloria came to personify the cause of equality for women,” said Lamonaca, “and Barbara’s work was a form of activism through art.”

One woman stood up during the Q & A, proffering adamantly, as if her life depended on it, a wonderful quote from Schopenhauer. “Talent hits a target that no one else can hit. Genius hits a target that no one else can see.”

Another audience member during Q & A asked Steinem about her relationship to Betty Freidan. (1921-2006), like Steinem, a stanch feminist who wrote the groundbreaking book The Feminine Mystique (1963) and founded National Organization for Women (NOW) whose aim was to bring women in the mainstream of American society in a fully equal partnership with men.

Right: “Barbara Nessim: An Artful Life,” fills three floors of the gallery building with Nessim’s work from the 1960s to the present, and includes prints, drawings, paintings, posters, illustrations, and clothing.

Steinem’s answer, while praising the importance of Freidan, was quite surprising, as one would think that they would have been close buddies, but Freidan, as Steinem related was 10 years older than her and from a different generation altogether. Freidan’s book was geared towards married women whose job was that of a house wife. At the time I was not married and already working. The surprise was that Steinem never spent any time alone with Freidan and only saw her approximately six times in total, either at some conference or on a panel.

The most unexpected and controversial remark – Steinem seems to have a bone to pick here – was an attack on Warhol. She called him a “Fraud” and said “that the people in Pittsburg (where the Warhol Museum is) should picket the bastard.” Given that he seems to be ruling the auction houses and is having tons of exhibitions around the world – yes, we are drowning in Warholia. Bard should invite Steinem to give a talk on Warhol. I am sure it would be an eye-opener. Though Warhol was damned, Steinem, if I remember correctly, did have a nice word to say about Jeff Koons.

The most valuable advice passed on by Steinem and Nessim to Bard’s Student’s, and which could apply to everybody, came at the end of the evening.

Left: Barbara Nessim welcoming visitors at her Bard Graduate Gallery of Art opening, November 25, 2014. Photo: Edward Rubin

“Don’t listen to me,” Steinem said. “Listen to yourself. Listen to the voice inside. Do what you love so much that you forget what time it is. Do something that you would do even if you didn’t get paid…If you can do that along the way you can end up where you want to be. Nessim, agreeing wholeheartedly with Steinem added, “Try and figure out who is inside of you and identify that and just let it flow”

For those that missed the conversation go to the following link:

http://www.bgc.bard.edu/news/events/gloria-steinem.html