Judy Ledgerwood (born 1959) is an American abstract painter and educator, who has been based in Chicago.Waspe, Roland, and Philip Vanderhyden. Judy Ledgerwood, Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2009. Retrieved August 19, 2019. Her work confronts fundamental, historical and contemporary issues in abstract painting within a largely high-modernist vocabulary that she often complicates and subverts.Yau, John. "Judy Ledgerwood’s Blunt Celebrations of Female Sexuality," Hyperallergic, April 29, 2018. Retrieved August 19, 2019.Adcock, Craig. Cold Days: Judy Ledgerwood, Chicago: The Renaissance Society, 1999.Snodgrass, Susan. "Review of Exhibitions: Chicago," Art in America, April 1992, p. 166–7. Ledgerwood stages traditionally feminine-coded elements—cosmetic and décor-related colors, references to ornamental and craft traditions—on a scale associated with so-called "heroic" abstraction; critics suggest her work enacts an upending or "domestication" of modernist male authority that opens the tradition to allusions to female sexuality, design, glamour and pop culture.Smith, Roberta. "Judy Ledgerwood: 'April Showers'," The New York Times, June 24, 2011, p. C29. Retrieved August 20, 2019.Sherlock, Maureen P. "The Land Before Her," Judy Ledgerwood (catalogue), Chicago: Feigen Inc., 1993.Walker, Hamza. "Fox in the Snow," Exhibition essay, "Judy Ledgerwood: Cold Days," Chicago: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago Newsletter, January 1999. Critic John Yau writes, "In Ledgerwood’s paintings the viewer encounters elements of humor, instances of surprise, celebrations of female sexuality, forms of vulgar tactility, and intense and unpredictable combinations of color. There is nothing formulaic about her approach."Yau, John. "Sexual Abstraction: Judy Ledgerwood’s Recent Paintings," The Brooklyn Rail, May 15, 2016. Retrieved August 19, 2019.
Ledgerwood has exhibited widely at galleries throughout the United States and in Europe and at institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago,Art Institute of Chicago. "Judy Ledgerwood: Chromatic Patterns for the Art Institute of Chicago," Exhibitions. Retrieved August 20, 2019. Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago,Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. "The Wall Projects Series," Exhibition materials, 1996. Retrieved August 20, 2019. Smart Museum of Art,Smart Museum of Art. "Judy Ledgerwood: Chromatic Patterns for the Smart Museum," Exhibitions. Retrieved August 20, 2019. and Renaissance Society.Ledgerwood, Judy. Judy Ledgerwood: Cold Days, Chicago: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago Newsletter, January 1999. Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Copse, 1988, Judy Ledgerwood," Collection. Retrieved August 20, 2019. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Art Institute of Chicago,Art Institute of Chicago. "Judy Ledgerwood", Artists. Retrieved August 20, 2019. and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago,Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. "Judy Ledgerwood", Artists. Retrieved August 20, 2019. among others; a monograph, Judy Ledgerwood, was published in 2009 by Hatje Cantz.Grabner, Michelle. ON PTG, Manawa, WI: Poor Farm Press, 2012. Retrieved August 19, 2019. Ledgerwood lives and works in the Chicago area with her husband, artist Tony Tasset, and teaches at Northwestern University.Yood, James. "Collaborations 1998: Printworks Gallery," Artforum, February 1999, p. 10.Northwestern University. "Judy Ledgerwood, Alice Welsh Skilling Professor of Art" Faculty, Art, Theory and Practice. Retrieved August 20, 2019.
Life and career Ledgerwood was born in 1959 in the small farming community of Brazil, Indiana and identified as an artist from an early age.Renaissance Society. Why Paint?: Judy Ledgerwood, Jim Lutes, Kay Rosen, Kevin Wolff, Chicago: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1992.Ledgerwood, Judy. "Speakeasy," New Art Examiner, January 1996, p. 14–5.Mettam, Laura M. "Artist Insights: Judy Ledgerwood," Chicago Gallery News, May 5, 2015. Retrieved August 20, 2019. Her Midwest upbringing informed the sense of space and light in her early landscape-related work and her later use of craft and decorative forms relates to being from, in her words, a "family of quilters."Barcio, Phillip. "Judy Ledgerwood on Finding Pattern and Decoration in Everyday Life," Hyperallergic, May 17, 2018. Retrieved August 19, 2019. Ledgerwood attended the Art Academy of Cincinnati (BFA, 1982), where she met her future husband, artist Tony Tasset.Connors, Thomas. "Off the Wall," Modern Luxury, July 1, 2018, pp. 64–8. After graduating, she enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), attracted by that city's balance of affordability, available large studio spaces, and connection to the larger art world.Kirshner, Judith Russi. "Conversation with Julia Fish and Judy Ledgerwood," Art in Chicago: A History from the Fire to Now, Ed. Taft, Maggie and Robert Cozzolino, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018, p. 330–4. At SAIC, she studied under artists Christina Ramberg and Phil Hanson, among others, earning an MFA in 1984.Ghez, Susanne. "Judy Ledgerwood Interview," Judy Ledgerwood, Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2009. Retrieved August 19, 2019.
Ledgerwood was part of a conceptually oriented group of Chicago artists that embraced theory and a global, rather than regional, view of the art world, distinguishing them from the earlier Chicago Imagists.Kirshner, Judith Russi. "Resisting Regionalism," Art in Chicago 1945-1995, Lynne Warren, et al (editors), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996, p. 137. Retrieved May 1, 2018.Kirshner, Judith Russi. "Conversation with Kay Rosen and Tony Tasset," Art in Chicago: A History from the Fire to Now, Ed. Taft, Maggie and Robert Cozzolino, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018, p. 314–9. She began exhibiting professionally in group shows at galleries such as Randolph Street and Feature in 1987–8; solo efforts at Scott Hanson Gallery (New York, 1989) and Robbin Lockett Gallery (Chicago, 1989–92) soon followed.Artner, Alan G. "Catalogue is best part of 'nonspiritual'," Chicago Tribune, June 11, 1987, Sec. 5 p. 11E. In 1993, she began her teaching career at SAIC; she joined the Department of Art, Theory and Practice at Northwestern University in 1995, and was tenured in 2002. She has served as the department's Director of Graduate Studies and is the Alice Welsh Skilling Professor of Art. Ledgerwood has continued to exhibit widely, at galleries including Häusler Contemporary (Munich/Zurich, 2005–19), Tracy Williams Ltd. (New York, 2005–16), 1301PE (Los Angeles, 2002–19), Rhona Hoffman (Chicago, 2000–18), Feigen, Inc. (Chicago/New York, 1993–2000), and Barbara Davis (Houston, 2013–9).
Work and reception
Ledgerwood emerged in the 1980s during a postmodern crisis of faith in painting's relevance, viability, patriarchal conceits, and commodification by the art market—issues her work addresses through a range of formal and feminist-critical strategies.Hixson, Kathryn. "Chicago in Review," Arts, April 1989, p.108.Ghez, Susanne. Cold Days: Judy Ledgerwood, Chicago: The Renaissance Society, 1999. Her early work investigated gender issues encoded in 19th-century landscape painting and mid-20th-century Abstract Expressionism through formal choices informed by being female.Hixson, Kathryn. "Speakeasy," New Art Examiner, January 1996, p. 14–5. Her later work has shifted toward less referential, more direct abstraction focused on structure, light, color, decorative motifs, and physical presence and experience; it directly or indirectly references antecedents including Op Art, Matisse, Warhol, and the Pattern and Decoration movement.Waspe, Roland. "The Instant Joy of Painting," Judy Ledgerwood, Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2009. Retrieved August 19, 2019. Critics identify as central to her work: transgressive use of color as a vehicle for content and critique; imposing scale; attention to spatial relationships between picture plane and edge and surrounding physical space; freely painted, shifting motifs of patterned basic shapes; an emphasis on performative and material aspects of painting; a phenomenological embrace of tenuousness and optical effects regarding the viewing experience.Pagel, David. "Why Paint?" Why Paint?: Judy Ledgerwood, Jim Lutes, Kay Rosen, Kevin Wolff, Chicago: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1992.
Landscape-related abstraction (1988–1993) Critic Kathryn Hixson described Ledgerwood's early paintings as cunningly painted "commodity object[s] of seemingly inspired, moody, atmospheric space" appropriated from the sublime traditions of Romanticism (J. M. W. Turner, Albert Pinkham Ryder) and color-field painting (Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman), rather than inspired by nature.Hixson, Kathryn. "Cool, Conceptual, Controversial," New Art Examiner, May 1988, p. 30–33. Largely monochromatic and monumental, they featured nearly uniform oil and encaustic surfaces that hovered between enveloping abstraction and irregular fields barely suggesting landscape (e.g., Composition in Pink, Brown and Violet or Summer Fog, 1992),Art Institute of Chicago. "Summer Fog, 1992, Judy Ledgerwood", Artworks. Retrieved August 20, 2019. with occasional insertions of small, flat rectangles that blurred distinctions further.Rice, Nancy. "'New Realism' Show Is Real, But Not New," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 22, 1988. Sec. p. 4C.Hixson, Kathryn. "Chicago in Review," Arts, December 1990, p.107-8.Kirshner, Judith Russi. "A Narrative of Women’s Experience," Art Criticism, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1990, p. 20–31. While traditional reviewers were sometimes less attuned to Ledgerwood's conceptual intent,Artner, Alan G. "Judy Ledgerwood," Chicago Tribune, January 17, 1992, Sec.7, p .66.Diehl, Carol. "Judy Ledgerwood/Germans van Eck,” ARTnews, Summer 1993, p.178. others identified in her articulation of differences a subversion of conventional equations of sublime with masculine, and beauty with feminine.Bonesteel, Michael. "Medium Cool: New Chicago Abstraction," Art in America, December 1987, p.138–47. Maureen Sherlock suggested that Ledgerwood's canvasses restaged domestic, "demure and private gestures" in powerful, public form through their highly charged synthetic colors (pinks, roses, reds), which evoked female domains (cosmetics, the body, interior design), and intimate markmaking (dabs, finger-painting), which deflated the mythic power and profundity of Abstract-Expressionist gesture. David Pagel described the work as orchestrating a "double-sided viewing" that "surreptitiously traced the power of American abstraction back to nature" and played havoc with simplistic oppositions such as abstract/representational, pure paint/illusionism, culture/nature.
Circular-motif abstraction (1993–2002)