Maria Porges (born 1954) is an American artist and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area.Pritikin, Renny. "Maria Porges: 35 Years," SquareCylinder, September 11, 2023. Retrieved January 5, 2024.Artforum. "Maria Porges," Authors. Retrieved January 11, 2024. As an artist she is known for the prominent use of text in her visual works, which encompass sculpture, works on paper and assemblage and have an epistemological bent.Webster, Mary Hull. "Maria Porges at John Berggruen Gallery," Artweek, February 1998, p. 18. As a critic Porges has written for Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture and SquareCylinder, among other publications.Roth David M. "New Domestics @ Monterey Museum of Art," SquareCylinder, September 24, 2018. Retrieved January 5, 2024.California College of the Arts. Maria Porges, People. Retrieved January 5, 2024.
Porges is best known for the curiously labeled wax bottle sculptures she created throughout the 1990s and early oughts,Melrod, George. "Openings," Art & Antiques, October 1996, p. 30.Bonetti, David. "Witty ways with words, material," San Francisco Examiner, March 24, 2000, p. 37. Retrieved January 5, 2024.King, Sarah. "Maria Porges at Allene LaPides," Art in America, March 2000, p.137–38. together with the tools and weapons fashioned from books that appear throughout her career.Roth David M. "Maria Porges @ Seager Gray," SquareCylinder, May 2, 2016. Retrieved January 5, 2024.Spector, Buzz and Maria Porges. "Conversation: Maria Porges/Buzz Spector," Visions, Fall 1990, p. 14–18.Helfand, Glen. "The Ordinary Transformed," Artweek, January 7, 1989, p. 7. The work is considered to be provocative in its method of inquiry and redefinition of artistic syntax. According to critic Sarah S. King of Art in America, "[Porges] invites viewers to focus their attention on the paradoxical relationships between empirical and subjective systems of interpretation through clever juxtapositions of objects, images and words."
Porges's work belongs to the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and Oakland Museum of California.San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Maria Porges, Artists. Retrieved January 5, 2024.Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Bomboozle, Maria Porges, Collection. Retrieved January 5, 2024.Oakland Museum of California. Acts of (Self) Deception #4, Maria Porges, Collection. Retrieved January 11, 2024. She has exhibited at SFMOMA, the deYoung Museum and Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, among other venues.Watten, Barrett. "Strategies: SECA," Artweek, November 4, 1992, p. 24.Hamlin, Jesse. "The State of Bay Area Art, Now and Then / Shows at de Young, Yerba Buena reflect diversity and history," San Francisco Chronicle, November 14, 1999. Retrieved January 5, 2024.Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. " Bottle: Contemporary Art and Vernacular Tradition," Exhibitions. Retrieved January 11, 2024. Porges lives in Oakland and is a professor at the California College of the Arts.
Education and career Porges was born in 1954 in Oakland, California. She studied art at Yale University and University of Chicago, earning a BA and MFA, respectively.Hamlin, Jesse. "Messages in her bottles," San Francisco Chronicle, April 5, 2000, p. 1, 6. Retrieved January 5, 2024.
In her early career, she had solo exhibitions at SFMOMA (1992) and alternative spaces such as Southern Exposure, SF Camerawork and Intersection for the Arts.Weigand, David. "Good Exposure," San Francisco Chronicle, April 25, 1999. Retrieved January 5, 2024.Rapko, John. "Remembering and Forgetting," Artweek, June 6, 1991, p.28 .San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. SECA Art Award 1992, San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1992. Subsequent solo exhibitions took place at the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art (2008) and Sanchez Art Center (2016),di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art. "After the Age of Reason: New Work by Maria Porges," 2008. Retrieved January 11, 2024.Sanchez Art Center. Maria Porges: F(r)iction. Retrieved January 11, 2024. and galleries such as John Berggruen (1995–2003), Seager Gray (2016) and Fourth Wall (2023, retrospective) in the Bay Area,Klausner, Betty. "Maria Porges," Art in America, March 1996. David Beitzel Gallery (2000) and Littlejohn Contemporary (2003) in New York, James Harris (2001, Seattle) and Carrie Secrist (2003, Chicago).Johnson, Ken. "Maria Porges," The New York Times, April 14, 2000, p. B44. Retrieved January 5, 2024.Josslin, V. "Porges brings art, magic and science together," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, February 9, 2001.Brunson, Jamie. "Maria Porges,", Stretcher, January 2003. Retrieved January 5, 2024. Her work has appeared in surveys at White Columns,White Columns/Hallwalls. The Library of Babel, New York: White Columns/Hallwalls, 1991. SFMOMA,San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. " Looking at Ourselves: Works by Women Artists from the Logan Collection," Exhibitions. Retrieved January 11, 2024. the deYoung Museum, Oakland Museum of California,Westbrook, Lindsey. "Oakland After Dark," East Bay Express, March 27, 2002. Retrieved January 5, 2024. Aldrich Museum and Monterey Museum of Art, among others.
Work and reception Porges is known for featuring text in her artworks, often in semiotic counterpoint to commonplace objects.Whitney, Kay. "Maria Porges," Sculpture, April 2000, p. 67–69. Her assemblage and collage pieces employ actual objects while her drawings and sculptures reference them. The text takes a variety of forms and lengths, appearing variously as labels affixed to forms, captions with drawings, and blocks of text partially obscured by surface cuts and folds or by thickly sculpted glass. Wordplay features prominently in some of the works, for example as words embedded within other words or in the use of binary pairs. Certain themes are recurrent, including history, time, science, magic, weaponry and child psychology.
Art observers have characterized Porges' work as philosophical and Dadaistic in its approach, as its charged juxtaposition of text and imagery raises questions about meaning and how it is made. The subjective ambiguity of the artist's texts contrasts with the tangible and conventional elements of her visuals to uncanny effect. Kathleen Whitney of Sculpture wrote, "Porges places a verbal proposition in contention with the mechanics of visual communication in a way that confounds both… Involved with creating meaning through association and context, her work questions basic expectations of the role art serves."
Noted influences on the artist include anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and artists Claes Oldenburg and René Magritte. The often surrealist character of Porges' work extends beyond visual elements to the incorporated text, with critic David M. Roth describing Porges as a "meta-fabulist," whose mid-career artwork evokes "a fusion of Max Ernst and Dick and Jane." Commentators also draw parallels to the text and imagery of the iconic children's book, Alice in Wonderland. Childhood is a prominent theme in Porges' oeuvre, and similar to Alice, Porges' children are innocents beset by ogres, villains and a latent sense of threat. The artist's child-themed work is reported to be influenced by her experiences both as a mother of twin daughters and as a child of supportive but cerebral parents.Moser, Charlotte. "Down Home," Artweek, April 24, 1992.
Porges' artworks vary widely in their aesthetic approach. Reviewers characterize her bottle sculptures as possessing a formal sensibility akin to the still lives of Giorgio Morandi, while noting a marked aesthetic contrast with other works—including some concurrently developed—which they describe as more "enigmatic" and "less mediated." Still other of her series channel pop art in their vintage comic styling.Nargi, Lela. "Bomboozle, Maria Porges," Astounding Knits! Voyageur Press, 2011, p.148–49. Retrieved January 5, 2024.
Earlier work: 1988–2009 Porges began receiving critical attention in the late 1980s. Early works were largely assemblages, several of which featured text in conjunction with tools. The Tools of Knowledge (1988) featured axe handles bearing books as blades.Baker, Kenneth. "Finding a Message in Found Objects," San Francisco Chronicle, January 7, 1989, p. C-7. The books were sculpted into wedge shapes and partly retained their covers, revealing their former roles as dictionary and political tome. Old Saws (1990) featured common proverbs inscribed on a group of rusty saws that were hung from the gallery ceiling.Watten, Barrett. "The Writing on the Wall: Women and Language at CCAC," Artweek, July 5, 1990, p. 12–13. Books and tools—especially tools with weapon-like qualities—are recurrent motifs in Porges' work.
In the 1990s, Porges pursued an interest in casting and began creating objects in bronze, glass and wax.Bonetti, David. "Conceptual Art By The Book," San Francisco Examiner, April 24, 1992, p. D2.Snedeker, Rebecca. "Waxing Pain," New Orleans Art Review, November-December 1996, p. 30–31. In 1995 she created the sculpture Witness, an open glass book atop a steel bookstand with the word "thought" etched into a glass shelf below. Squeeze (1993–2001), an hourglass shaped object in hot sculpted glass, explores a scientific principle called "the observer effect," distorting the text mounted on a wall behind as viewers try to read it. Other cast works featured bronze relief drapery samples and oversized hands in various materials and settings that were based on fragments and gestures from art-historical paintings.
Around this time, Porges developed a predilection for working with wax and began creating the cast wax bottle sculptures for which she became widely known.Artner, Alan. "Maria Porges stays true to unique vision," Chicago Tribune, April 1, 1999, Sect. 5, p. 2. Appearing in groups, the bottles bore thought-provoking labels and evoked apothecary medicines in their arrangement on shelves and in cabinets.Knight, Heather. "Cabinets of Wonder capture spirit of the past," San Francisco Chronicle, November 1, 2002. Retrieved January 5, 2024. Those that appeared in her 2000 show "Miraculous Vessels" were described by New York Times critic Ken Johnson as "poetic" and "metaphysical," suggesting such impalpable contents as "Youth With Wisdom," and "Solitude Without Loneliness." In similar fashion, her 1999 sculpture Natural Magic: Cures for Modern Maladies features a miscellaneous assortment of bottles with intangible labels such as "For Compassion Fatigue" and "To Relieve Boredom." The bottles are grayscale in tone save for a small red one marked "Drink Me." Her satirical piece Acts of (Self) Deception (2000) critiques the hyperbolic use of language with imaginary bottle contents that include "The Science of Square Dancing" and "The Art of Point-of-Purchase Packaging."
Concurrent with her cast creations, Porges produced other artwork that critics describe as aesthetically less formal. One such work is Porges' 1997 piece Telling Time, a functioning clock that cycles through historical events—genocide, peace, famine—in place of numbers.
Porges' 2003 exhibition, "Bombast," was a thematic exploration of explosives which appeared in a variety of materials and forms. Some of the pieces echoed her bottle works, placing labeled objects—this time sculpted bombs—on shelves in careful composition. Others—such as Molotov Museum I, an improvised-bomb wall clock of sorts—recalled her earlier found-object assemblages. Bomboozle (2003) introduced a new medium—felted wool—in the form of stuffed knit bombs.