Judith Linhares
"My women express agency, self-awareness, and self-reliance. I like to say they own their own real-estate."
Judith Linhares (b. 1940) earned her BFA and MFA degrees from California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; among others. Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator, a major exhibition featuring five decades of work, was presented at the Sarasota Art Museum, Sarasota, FL, in winter 2022. The exhibition included a curated presentation of works by Bill Adams, Ellen Berkenblit, Karin Davie, Dona Nelson, and Mary Jo Vath, highlighting the longstanding influence of dialogue between artists. Recent solo exhibitions also include Honey in the Rock at Massimo de Carlo, London, UK, and Love Letters from San Jose at Parker Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Several works by Linhares were featured in the highly acclaimed group exhibition The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection, The Drawing Center, New York, NY, which was on view through January 19, 2025. Her third solo exhibition with P·P·O·W, The river is moving, The blackbird must be flying was on view in Spring 2025.
MEPAINTSME: You were born in Pasadena and eventually moved to the Bay Area to study art. Did the cultural and artistic climate of the California Bay Area in the 1960s and 70s have a big impact on you growing up?
JUDITH LINHARES: Living in the Bay Area during the 60s and 70s was certainly impactful. But I would have to say that my experience growing up as a native Californian, as the child of a family that had lived in California for generations, played an equal, perhaps even larger role in my development as an artist. The long lazy days of my childhood provided a lot of solitude. In our back yard, or out on bike rides in the surrounding desert, it was the plants, animals, and insects that drew my attention. The Los Angeles River continues to live in my mind’s eye; the name Arroyo Seco, meaning dry stream, is a common name for streets close to the river. Bougainvillea, Century plants, and fig trees were, and still are, in abundance. And my grandmother, who was born in the 19th century and operated on many beliefs of a bygone era, would give me stern warnings about the indigenous coyotes and mountain lions and how they might be waiting behind trees or in the ravine to devoir unaware women. One of my strongest childhood memories is of walking home from kindergarten in east LA when suddenly a monkey jumped out of the bushes and looked straight into my eyes. I had seen pictures of monkeys but never seen a monkey in real life. The connection between this living creature and myself was profound. Was there something I needed to know? Was this a possible playmate? Did this creature live in the Oleander bush? My desire to know still propels me. I consider myself very lucky as, every so often, the world presents me with these transitory moments that make me feel whole and give me what I need to proceed.
MPM: You began your arts education at the California College of Arts and Crafts, correct? What were your experiences there?
JL: CCAC was founded on principles originating in the Arts and Crafts movement. Improving the status of craft workers by addressing wages and working conditions, were core objectives. Learning specific skills while also taking responsibility for the community and purpose of the art you would be making were central goals of CCAC. The idea that the well-crafted and designed objects should be for everyone. This spirit was still alive when I entered college in 1958. While there I learned to better conceptualize my experience of the modernist ethos with the help of several influential instructors. A few were graduates of Black Mountain College (a progressive and experimental school in North Carolina). But there were also others, such as the Mark Twain scholar Dr. Paul Schmitt. His class in aesthetics included readings on ”beauty“ by George Santayana, Tolstoy, and Susanne Langer, which propelled my thinking about art’s social and political context.
MPM: Did the Bay Area’s countercultural and feminist movements influence your artistic development?
JL: One could say that my arrival in the Bay Area was a crash course in the politics of the times, although most of the conversations took place in the streets. School was canceled on many occasions in solidarity and protest. The issues of the day were the fight for civil rights, racial equality and, of course, the Vietnam War. There was a lot going on on every front — psychology, anthropology, film, music, the Black Power movement. Many people were assassinated: JFK, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and many other charismatic black leaders were ferreted out by the corrupt FBI and shot or jailed under false allegations. The draft was taking the young men of my generation forced into fighting a war they did not believe in. Everyone that was alive at this time was affected by the changes taking place.
MPM: Did abstract expressionism initially draw you in as a painter, and how have those influences evolved?
JL: For a period of time I was very enamored with abstract expressionist painting, and I can say I still am very aware of the contributions of artists like Arshile Gorky, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning. Coming of age in L.A. provided an excellent context for understanding this new art, because L.A. was built in the nineteen fifties and examples of international modernist architecture, with its emphasis on how your body moves through space, were replacing orange groves at a rapid pace. Los Angeles was the “city of the future”; jazz, poetry, architecture and modernist painting were everywhere. Abstract expressionism opened up my mind to many ways of experiencing a rectangle on the wall. I learned that a painting is not necessary a picture to be read and analyzed but an object that is encountered in space, and can be seen and experienced below the neck before your head comes in to make judgments
MPM: You were included in the exhibition “Bad”Painting in 1978 at the New Museum. In retrospect, that exhibition represented a real break from the dry formalism that dominated much of the 70’s. What’s your memory of its reception overall? Did the show have a big impact on your own recognition within New York and the national art scene?
JL: Marcia Tucker came to the Bay Area on a mission to know and understand what kind of art was being made outside of NY. What stood out for me at the time was her inclusion of artists from Texas, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. I was well aware of the attitude toward work made outside of New York — “provincial” was the condemning term. My inclusion was a turning point and signaled that a life in NY might be possible for me and I might have the opportunity to exhibit my work. At the time, the reception of the “Bad” Painting show was mixed. Apparently many people did not understand the ironic intent of the show’s title. But in the long run the show started a process that has only become clear in the last ten years: a recognition of the value of diverse approaches to art making. I did have a show at the Concord Gallery in 1981. The Concord Gallery showed some newcomers on the scene like Haim Steinbach and the multi-talented Brian Eno. The gallery went on for a few years and closed in 1984. There were some great figurative artists on the scene in the 1980s: Clemente, Eric Fischl, and Susan Rothenberg to mention a few, all of them coming from very different perspectives. But in 1986 the art market crashed and did not pick up again until the early 1990s. I did not have gallery representation in NYC again until 1996. I showed in other cities but not NYC.
MPM: How do you reflect on your role or position with figurative painting’s eventual dominance in the early 80s?
JL: There were many new approaches to painting going on in New York in the early 1980s. I had been to NY a few times, taken my slides around to galleries, spent time in museums. Living in New York was different from being a visitor, I found it challenging, the pressure to have an opinion and to enter into conversations about your intentions for your work, was a new form of socializing for me. I can say I learned to talk out loud when I moved to NY. New York has more connection to Europe and to history than life in California provided, I wanted the experience of living in NYC, I wanted my world view expanded. As a younger artist I felt inhibited by art history, I perceived history as a tyranny of defining art in terms of style, with an emphasis on progress. I wanted to make art from my experience as a woman. I felt women had not really been able to shine because they were not in charge of the narrative that decides who is important and credited for ideas. By the nineteen-eighties I was ready to call myself a painter and take on history. I have never regretted the move and have learned a great deal from the world class museums and conversations with fellow artists. There seems to be an agreement in New York City that culture is important, you feel it, and it puts wind in my sails.
MPM: Is there an underlying Mythology or symbolic system that guides your content, or do the symbols emerge more spontaneously through the act of making?
JL: I do not paint specific myths, with the exception of Psyche and Amor, because the story is about light and seeing as a metaphor for transformation, and so I have used this subject in a few paintings. As the story goes, a woman named Psyche is told by her husband Amor that she can never see him in the light. Psyche’s curiosity gets the better of her, and, encouraged by her sisters who say things like “Who is this guy Amor? Are you sure he is not a monster?”, she sneaks up on her husband with a lamp and sees him in the light. But a drop of oil lands on him, he wakes up, and flies back to his mother. Psyche needs to then follow him through the underworld. This myth for me is about the work of transformation through love. I see this story played out in artful dramas and real life all around me all the time.
It is important for me to use a process that is highly improvisational. I sometimes use objects, cheap figurines, and carnival prizes that I draw from life, and build them into the composition.
I am inventing as I go along, making many revisions. I use a lot of paint rags! Sometimes I turn the canvas upside down. I work on several smaller paintings at the same time so I can try out alternative motifs, colors and compositions. I want discovery to be part of the process. What I don’t want is to illustrate what I think. When I start I am looking for how the parts, figures, rocks, trees, log cabins, and animals can visually fit together and make a coherent whole within the rectangle. Once I see a dynamic relationship between the parts developing, I concentrate on making the space more specific.
Elements of landscapes are not specific locations but more generalized: the sea, the desert, the canyon, the mountains. I am making environments for the figures and animals to inhabit. The wife, the maiden, the witch, the crone, the mother, the dreamer, the workman, and the lovers find one another in these places.
MPM: I feel your figures often exude a freedom and wildness, coexisting with wild animals in fantastical landscapes. Do you see your use of the nude female form a symbol of autonomy and inner life?
JL: My women express agency, self-awareness, and self-reliance. I like to say they own their own real-estate. They are not posing for the viewer, they are free from being seen as idealized pleasers. They live in a wild place where a woman can talk to a lion, cook over an open fire, and of course go naked without or fear or shame. Theatricality and self-invention are definitely part of how I think about my women.
MPM: Has your relationship to feminist art changed since you began your career? Have your views on feminism evolved over time?
JL: Work made by women gets my attention, I have an interest in how other woman are experiencing their lives. Not all work made by women has feminist content. Many of my woman friends are making art with no political agenda, even though these same women identify as feminists. I hold in my mind, and memory, reverence for art and artists that came before me and broke barriers for women artists. Meret Oppenheim’s “Le Déjeuner en fourrure”, her fur lined tea cup, saucer and spoon is one example of feminist art. I recognized the humor. What is funny is the confluence of the tea cup as a symbol of the world of cultivated and civil domestic life contrasted against the raw nature of human sexual anatomy. Women are the sponsors and keepers of tea cups and all the fine manners taking place at tea parties. This small and delicate cup, saucer, and spoon are covered in fur. It was inspiring to me that a woman made this object, and that she is aware and slightly self-deprecating in her invention. Very funny and very human. “Le Déjeuner en fourrure” was the first work by a woman artist to be purchased by William Bar for the Museum of Modern Art. My relationship to the feminist political movement has kept me in touch with an exceptional community of women that have common cause. Many of my long-term and important friendships started and continue around the desire to see women listened to and respected for their unique perspectives. This has not changed for me over time but conditions for women have improved and I hope the progress continues — it is a critical moment for women.
MPM: Would you say that the light and sparseness of the West Coast has had a tremendous impact on your painting sensibility in regards to color and atmosphere?
JL: Yes. Growing up in California definitely formed my relationship to landscape and light. Real life experience plays a part in what I have chosen to concentrate on when developing my process. Although the choice to use color as light in the substance of paint also comes from looking at paintings in museums. One of my favorite art experiences is seeing the Bellini Painting of “St. Frances receiving the light” at the Frick collection. The combination of the figure’s gesture and the subtlety of the pale but articulated color, shifting from cool to warm, is breathtaking.
MPM: Do you think your teaching career at institutions like the School of Visual Arts and NYU have had a strong impact on younger generations of figurative and feminist artists?
JL: I was fortunate enough to be in the Bay Area at the same time as the psychologist and educator Rhoda Kellogg. I read her research on the art of children and I owned one of her illustrated books where she used children’s paintings to illustrate fairytales. She believed children of all cultures began to represent the figure as a circle. I found this profound. I loved the connection between the desire to make an image and the developing brain and the common solution of the circle. Rhoda Kellogg believed all children are artists. Not to equate the many people that have been in my classes with children but I do think every student is in the class to find something that will help them develop the skill and discipline to become artists. I have considered myself lucky to have been able to teach most of my life. I never set out to indoctrinate anyone but love giving permission to people from my teacher’s podium, happy to share skills. But becoming an artist is about all kinds of discovery, much has to be found on one’s own. I am thrilled that people find things in my work they feel liberated by, if they are borrowing from my vocabulary, fine, I have stood on the shoulders of many other painters but acknowledging the borrowing is good.
Judith Linhares is represented by P·P·O·W Gallery, New York.
Great painter and myth-maker herself!
A great read. I'm a huge fan of her work and loved interviewing her for ArtWrite #20: Painting The Narrative a few years ago.