Virginia Maksymowicz

Early life

Virginia Maksymowicz was born in 1952 in Brooklyn, NY and now lives in Philadelphia, PA. She received a B.A. in Fine Arts from Brooklyn College of the City University^[1] of New York (1973) and an M.F.A. in Visual Arts from the University of California,^[2] San Diego (1977).

Works

She has exhibited her work at the Franklin Furnace, Alternative Museum, the Elizabeth Foundation and Grey Gallery in New York City; the Mitchell Museum in Illinois; the Michener and Woodmere Museums in Pennsylvania; and in college, university and nonprofit galleries throughout the U.S. and abroad.

Her works use a hybrid of sculpture and painting, and is usually displayed as a wall relief, with figures or objects often juxtaposed with narrative texts. The primary media she uses are handmade paper, Hydrostone and Hydrocal FGR 95.

Maksymowicz has a particular interest in feminist issues and she often focuses on the particular circumstances of a range of women, both in past history and in current times. Her figures are often cast from her own body and the stories she tells have their foundation in some aspect of the artist's personal experience.^[3]^[4]

Exhibitions

Structure and Metaphor

May 9, 2008 – June 22, 2008

Using the ideas of canephorae and caryatids, historical figures and architectural elements in the form of women, Maksymowicz addresses the significance and power of women as structural support for society. Maksymowicz sees this form as a metaphor for the role of women as the pillars of civilization, stating, "My current interest in the female body lies in exploring metaphors for the foundational but often unrecognized role of women in supporting social structures. These include the architectural forms of canephorae and caryatids, columns and capitals, and their mythological underpinnings through Demeter, Persephone, and the bread of life." All of the imagery in the exhibition is based on research Maksymowicz conducted while she was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome in the fall of 2006. The drawings and photographs she created were inspired by a wide range of architectural and sculptural sources, including Hadrian's Villa caryatids, works in various museums and churches, Baroque buildings, and the contemporary architecture of restaurants and other commercial establishments. Utilizing drawings and casts of architectural elements and of bread, the artist creates an environment at the DCCA that speaks to the history of art, visual culture, and public and private gender roles.^[5]

Women on Columns

In the fall of 2006, Maksymowicz was able to spend five weeks in Italy, three of them as a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. Her goal while there was to gather as many images as possible of the female body in architecture: from the reproductions of the Erechtheion caryatids at Hadrian's Villa to the many statues of the Virgin Mary posed atop columns and spires.

Aesthetic Distance, first created for the Michener Museum in Doylestown, PA, considers this latter structural form but replaces Mary with sculptures of ordinary women. These figures are naked, out of reach and almost out of sight, with no means of climbing off their pedestals.

The Three Graces, whose abode was atop Mont Olympia, were usually depicted as dancing, with arms entwined. In her version of this traditional grouping at the Woodmere Museum in Philadelphia, they become isolated. Each sits crouched or slumped upon her own pedestal/column, perhaps wearied by her eternal responsibilities in assuring human happiness.^[3]

Bodies in Architecture

The Physical Boundaries of This World, 2002, was a room-size installation at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York City. Four female bodies lay on a cyan-blue floor, each straddling the middle portion of what could be seen as sculpture stands or as architectural struts that spanned the gallery from wall to wall. Viewers were invited to step over and around the figures.

Peripheral Vision was first designed in 2002 for three "unnoticed" walls in the corners of a gallery at the Phillips Museum in Lancaster, PA — walls that are not large enough for most displays and that are usually seen only from the corners of one's eyes.^[3]^[6]

The Physical Boundaries of This World

Comparisons

In recent years, Maksymowicz's artwork has been following a complex visual trail of architecture and figurative/representational elements: caryatids, columns, canephorae, baskets of produce, Corinthian capitals, acanthus, bodies, bones, bread and water.

She states "Caryatids and canephorae are, in many ways, the visual summation of human life and women's fundamental role in supporting it."^[7]

In these excerpts from the series Comparisons, Maksymowicz pairs formally and conceptually equivalent images of women, overlaying them so that there is a shifting, visual interaction. A canephora from the Vatican Museums merges with a figurine from the folk art museum in EUR, Rome. A caryatid in Munich dialogues with a woman in a bread/salt welcoming ceremony in Russia.^[8]

Rewards

She is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in sculpture (1984), and over the years has been honored with other grants and awards. Her artwork has been reviewed in Sculpture Magazine, the New York Times, New York Newsday, the New Art Examiner and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her series, The History of Art, appears on the cover of The Female Body, published by the University of Michigan Press.

Career

She has been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome (2006; 2012; 2014), an artist-in-residence at the Powel House Museum in Philadelphia (2006–07), and a fellow at the Vermont Studio Center (2007).

For more than 30 years, Maksymowicz has been developing a type of imagery that addresses cultural and political issues in a nontraditional, but understandable, form. The artworks she creates are "readable" on multiple levels (often using humor as a "hook"), containing esthetic and historical references familiar to trained artists as well as real-life issues of importance to non-artists.

Current life

Maksymowicz holds an MFA from The University of California, San Diego and a BA in Fine Arts from Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y. She has shown work throughout the country, and received Mellon Foundation, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and Leeway Foundation grants. She was recently an Artist-in-Residence at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT and before that, a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. Maksymowicz is currently an Associate Professor of Art in the Department of Art & Art History, Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, PA.^[5]^[9]

References

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