Juliette Gordon (American, b. 1934)
Untitled (Love Potion), circa 1973
Collage on board
30 x 20 inches
Provenance:
Allan Stone Gallery, New York
Sold with certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.
Juliette Gordon is a witty, perceptive, and highly intelligent artist. Her most iconic works are wickedly funny and sometimes highly political photocollages that were inspired by her involvement in the women’s movement of the early 1970s. At the time, she was exhibiting with the likes of Nancy Spero and May Stevens. Juliette Gordon was a trailblazer, an important member of the feminist art movement in New York, and a respected artist in the inner circles of radical anti-war politics.
Gordon’s position on the status of women artists was made explicit in her essay, First Feminist Manifesto of W.A.R. (Women Artists in Revolution):
“Women artists should be able to be women and wives, creative beings, colleagues, mothers and not find conflict between these roles. The present economic situation not only deprives the woman of her fulfillment as a total human being, but deprives society of the art of the total woman. We began to crack the traditional record of no hits in the art world during the last half century, but the female is still encased in a basically restricted image which needs to be changed both within the self and in society as both are mutually inter-dependent. Unfetter the female genius and who knows where this will lead? Without present conflicts and barriers, she can be strongly committed to her chosen art and still be very much a woman. What will the fiber of our life be then?”
Juliette Gordon would have taken her rightful place among her more well-known feminist contemporaries, but her career and nearly her life were curtailed by a disastrous fire in 2003. Born Juliette Shapiro, on April 12, 1934, in New York City, Juliette and her younger brother, Mitchell, were raised primarily in Connecticut, but the family spent time in Brooklyn and Manhattan as well. Her mother, Ruth Shapiro, had immigrated to the United States from Soviet Russia. She died as a result of a stroke when Juliette was only seventeen. She has very fond memories of her mother, but her father was another matter. Unsupportive of his daughter’s artistic aspirations, he was much more enthusiastic about her younger brother’s pursuit of the law. Although he paid for his son’s education, he refused to pay for his daughter’s college. This was an early lesson in the unfairness of gender bias, and affected Gordon politically and personally throughout her life. As a result, she left home to put herself through art school.
Gordon received an excellent art education. Beginning in her teens, she studied at The American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Art Students League, and then the prestigious art college, Cooper Union. She received her BA at Brooklyn College, where she subsequently taught, and later taught at The City University of New York and in the New York City Public School System.
Gordon’s past is rich and eventful, and her work reflects a life of study and adventure. During an early brief marriage, she traveled extensively throughout Europe, Mexico, and Russia with her husband, a pharmacist and photographer. She continued to travel throughout her life. After her marriage ended in divorce, Gordon drove with a boyfriend to the West Coast and stayed with Janice Joplin and the Holding Company in Haight Ashbury. She returned to Manhattan in 1968 and opened The Juliette Gordon Gallery, a store-front space on East 73rd Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues. She lived behind the gallery and showed a number of up-and-coming artists.
Gordon had broad appetites for aesthetic experience and a decades-long career of art-making in assemblage, collage, painting, drawing, and printmaking. Yoko Ono had a loft at 112 Chambers Street where Gordon made a great many large collages and assemblages in 1968. In 1972, Gordon participated in a significant alternative exhibition phenomenon called Ten Downtown, where ten artists opened their studios to the public for four consecutive weekend afternoons once a year. In 1977, Ten Downtown was held at The Institute for Art & Urban Resources, celebrating the Ten Years of Ten Downtown. The installation was curated by Lawrence Alloway, a powerful force in the New York art scene, head of the art department at Stony Brook University, and a critic for Artforum. Gordon’s involvement in this exhibition proves her position of importance as a member of the art world’s avant-garde.
Gordon taught art for thirty years in the NY Public Schools, traveling to the South Bronx, Washington Heights, and Brooklyn. As a role model for countless aspiring artists, she continued to mentor many of them well beyond graduation. What she gave her students was a taste of her great enthusiasm for the process of making art, as well as her enjoyment of the New York art scene. She lived a colorful life, riding her bicycle from art opening to art opening, gathering detritus for her assemblages, and celebrating the world of art.
In 2001, she suffered a stroke. According to her son and friends, the stroke left her with loss of mobility in her left arm, some loss of cognitive function, and a slight change in her personality. She bought a Macintosh computer and Gordon began making digital art as she recovered from the stroke.
Juliette Gordon’s work needs to be seen, recognized, and preserved for future generations of artists. She made a significant mark on the feminist art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She fought for women, against war, and for artistic freedom. She exhibited with the most respected contemporary feminist artists of her time, including Nancy Spero and May Stevens. It is time for Juliette Gordon’s work to receive the exposure and recognition it deserves.
Gordon’s work is sophisticated and rapturous. Her art and writing contributed significantly to the period in which she worked in New York, and the integrity of her message is unabashed. Now that her oeuvre of over 1500 works has been rediscovered, resuscitated, and recorded, it is time to present it so that she can take her rightful place in the history of the art of her period. A retrospective of her work is appropriate, in fact, way overdue.
