Glance at Culture - Martha Szabo's NYC Solo Exhibition & MSeum's Celebration of Unknown Female Artists

Cover art: Martha Szabo, Rooftops in Snow 11, oil on linen, 24 x 35 in., circa 1964

To learn more, please visit the sites for Martha Szabo and MSeum.

Show Notes:

0:00 Art historian Kathleen Hulser

1:30 Journalist Julia Szabo’s motivation to work on Martha Szabo’s body of work

4:30 MSeum to be built in the Catskills

5:00 National Association of Women in Construction

7:50 Justice for unknown female artists

11:15 Museum’s mission related to blind and low-vision visitors

13:45 Sculpture Robin Antar’s limestone sculpture of Szabo’s “Red Sunset”

15:20 Legacy to be created with MSeum includes redefining storage

16:45 Visible storage space

18:30 Julia Szabo’s parents

19:45 ‘Mother Artist’ field of scholarship

20:00 Author Hettie Judah

21:20 Reception for Martha Szabo’s exhibition Up On the Roof

22:10 Artist Christina Massey

23:20 Museum’s director Kathleen Hulser

24:30 “Up On the Roof” exhibition curated by Hulser

26:00 “Incorrigibles” trans media project

27:45 MSeum’s creation and mission

34:15 Hulser’s scope a MuSeum

36:45 Martha Szabo’s background and how it impacted her work 

43:15 Feedback about Martha Szabo’s solo exhibition Up On The Roof: Liberation, Transformation, Celebration

49:35 MSeum and exhibitions like “Up On The Roof” role in bringing some historical justice for female creatives

52:10 David Richard Gallery

Please share your comments and/or questions at stephanie@warfareofartandlaw.com

To hear more episodes, please visit Warfare of Art and Law podcast's website.

Music by Toulme.

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Thanks so much for listening!

© Stephanie Drawdy [2024]

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

One of the things that Marcus worked says to me in general, and that the museum's mission underlines, is that if we abandon our preconceptions and open our eyes to see in a very fresh way, we're going to be able to know something much, much larger and more exciting and challenging about the world than we ever figured was there.

Speaker 2: 0:29

Welcome to Warfare of Art and Law, the podcast that focuses on how justice does or doesn't play out when art and law overlap. Hi everyone, it's Stephanie, and that was art historian Kathleen Hulser discussing the work of artist Martha Zabo and the first museum created by women four women artists known as Mizzium, the innovative creation of journalist Julia Zabo. What follows is a conversation with Julia and Kathleen sharing their perspectives on Mizzium, its mission and the work of Martha Zabo, including a New York solo exhibition of her work entitled Up on the Roof Liberation Transformation Celebration. Julia Zabo, welcome to Warfare of Art and Law. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Speaker 3: 1:28

Thank you for having me, stephanie, and it's a great honor to be here, and I know that Martha Zabo, my mom, the artist, would be very pleased that I'm talking to you. She always wanted me to be an attorney, you know. So I would like to say that we are so grateful for the exhibition that's now on view through November 17th at the David Richard Gallery Up on the Roof Liberation Transformation Celebration and, basically, this is such a culmination of many, many years of effort that I was more than happy to put in on my mom's behalf and on behalf of her legacy as an artist and in the process of working on this which, by the way, was occasioned by the fact that I sustained a very serious stroke at the end of 2019. And I woke up in the middle of the night one day and I looked around me at all these beautiful paintings that my mother has done and we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of paintings and I thought, oh my God, what if I pre-deceased my mother and all of these paintings end up in a dumpster somewhere in New York? And so, from that moment on, I just basically didn't rest until I could get her recognized so that there would be someone else a witness to all of these treasures here that I was fortunate enough to grow up with.

Speaker 3: 3:07

So in applying myself to this like one of my dogs with a bone, I basically learned a lot about the heirs of women artists, and especially the daughters of women artists, and we are faced with extremely large amounts of artwork, largely because women were less exhibited than men for decades, and it's still happening today, and so the heirs of women artists are going to have exponentially more artwork to deal with, to store, to conserve, to cherish, but also to worry about what's going to happen to them after they, the heirs, are gone. So all of this information came rushing in on me and it was also very emotional to be reaching out to institutions and have them say that they have too much artwork and they can't store anymore, and so basically, you know, this was like my PhD sort of research here, and I didn't go to graduate school. I only have a BA. I'm the least educated person in my family, but now I know a lot more.

Speaker 3: 4:35

And all of those frustrations and inspirations sort of came together and one day I said you know what? I'm going to establish the world's first museum to be built by women, for women artists. I have a small 20 acre property in the northern Catskills of New York and damn if I'm not going to make that museum there one way or another. And within hours I heard back from the National Association of Women in Construction, which is a wonderful trade organization founded in the 1950s, and of course women in the construction trade experience all the same, shall we say, inequalities that women in the art world experience. And they called me back and they said they were on board and within another day we had our first architect and just it was as if all the souls of the departed women artists on the other side were tearing this on.

Speaker 3: 5:46

It was really like it didn't even come. The idea didn't sort of originate with me, it just sort of came through me and I'm very honored to have been tapped by all those spirits. And the name Museum also came like a bolt from the blue, like nobody can believe it. You know, one of my cousins, who has nothing nice to say to or about me, was like oh, that's really clever, you came up with that anyway. So that that's how I knew it was good.

Speaker 3: 6:15

So, um, so, basically I remain dedicated to this museum and a couple of times I've heard that people will say, oh well, that's your museum or that's your mother's museum, and it's not the case. Neither of those scenarios is the case. This is really a museum for all women artists, past, present and future. And so, uh, marce is just one of them, and, um, and I'm just so happy to have this mission in this second chapter of my life, and I know that this is why I was brought back from that stroke, because there's no earthly reason I should be here.

Speaker 3: 6:54

It happened in the center of my brain, which governs the speech and movement and everything. By rights, I should be mute and paralyzed, but I'm not, and I know it's because this was the mission and it had to be accomplished. So it isn't accomplished yet. We are still waiting for an architect's rendering that we can all project our imagination onto. I know it's coming soon, and, but we have a wonderful director, kathleen Hulser, and we have a wonderful advisory board, if I may call you out, stephanie. We're very grateful to you for sitting on our advisory board and and we're just we're all systems go. So I know that it's going to be something very important that the next generations of creative females are going to take forward.

Speaker 2: 7:48

Absolutely. And how do you see justice coming forward for female creatives like your mother and those who will be featured in museum?

Speaker 3: 7:59

Well, I think justice will come forward because it has to In the end. It's sort of like in Shakespeare when I think it's in Macbeth, you know, murder will out. In a similar vein, it's like justice will win in the end. It might take decades or centuries, but we are seeing now the uncovering and the discovering of, you know, artworks that previously were attributed to men, and now we're learning that they were actually done by women. And we are, we are being made aware of, like important monumental sculptures, say, in Russia, that you know, we just sort of, because they were of men subjects, we never stopped to think that it was a woman who actually sculpted them, and and so now I think we have a kind of 360 degree rotation in terms of the way we think of things and we look at things more with more scrutiny and we look for fairness. Now I think, right, whereas we all just got kind of lazy, including us women we all got kind of like I don't want to say complacent, but we just kind of were so busy trying to just get ourselves ahead in life and in our careers that we didn't think is a larger picture and how we pictured into it or how we figured into it, and now I believe that even young, young creatives of both and all genders are starting to think of the panoramic picture and of the past, present and future.

Speaker 3: 9:43

It's been pointed out to me that, well, just because you know, just because, let's say, you find a woman architect, doesn't mean it's going to be the person who totally understands your mission. So, yes, I also want to train myself not to fall into a trap that just because an individual is a woman, they're automatically on the side of museum or on the side of the right side of history right, or the right side of art history. It can be a man, it can be a woman, it can be any number of variations on just a human being, and so I feel like that's an important sort of layer of the justice discussion too. Is that, even though museum is really a binary institution, because we will be built by women and we are dedicated to women, to showcasing women, and of course, that includes trans women. I've been asked that a lot, so I always say, yes, a trans woman is a woman. So, but we are as an institution, we are deliberately binary, and I feel that's important because it's never been done before right To have something built from the ground up, including the people who construct the building designed by the woman architect, and the website designed by the woman, with typeface designed by a woman also. So I feel like that has to be done somewhere in the world, just as a beacon that it could be done and we did it.

Speaker 3: 11:16

So the other very important museum mission is to be the most enriching museum experience for blind and low-vision visitors anywhere in the world, because Mars and my mother is legally blind and in being her 24-7 caregiver as well as her legacy archivist, all that. It has come to my attention through my pounding research that women experience blindness 40% more than men, and this is a statistic that's been documented by the National Institutes of Health. But when you go to an eye doctor, nobody tells you this. As a woman patient and as the daughter of right, a woman patient, and so museum wants to help raise awareness of this kind of shocking and startling statistic, and we want to kind of in no way do we want to suggest that blindness is fun, okay, but we do kind of want to get especially women visitors a little comfortable with the idea that maybe it's not going to be about seeing things with their eyes forever right, and so we want to incorporate aspects of braille into everything the architecture, the artwork. We want to have as many tactile artworks as we can, because I know that if I inherit my mother's eyes, I'm going to want more from a museum experience than a braille translation of a sighted person's impressions of a painting, which is exactly what you get right now at the majority of museums that talk about accessibility and, frankly, I don't think that's enough. I'm going to want to quote, draw my own conclusions, right? I'm going to want to just feel something for myself.

Speaker 3: 13:22

And whether this is a bronze plaque next to a painting that sort of outlines, the you know, sort of duplicates, the figure in the painting on the bronze plaque and it's touchable, right in a raised relief, or if it's a stone carving, stone carving version of a painting which, by the way, the sculptor, robin Antar, who was born blind in one eye and she's a brilliant sculptor, she created a limestone carving of one of Martha's paintings and she tinted it with oil paints.

Speaker 3: 14:01

So this painting is touchable by everyone and, for those who maybe haven't experienced a sunset, maybe it will help to convey the majesty and the power of a sunset, and maybe it won't, but at least it's a try, right. And this is the kind of thing that museum wants to do, because, for whatever reason, it's never been done, just as a building by women, for women artists, has never been done, and and visible storage has maybe occasionally been done, but this idea of really accenting accessibility to the blind and low vision has not been done, at least in this country that I know of. Yet the way we envision doing it, and that's the final thing I want to say, is that loss of sight does not have to mean loss of vision, and there are many artists who have shown us that through history. The first one that comes to mind, of course, is Matisse, who did the cutouts because he was losing his sight and that was his way of battling back. So, yeah, museum is going to be all about vision.

Speaker 2: 15:19

In that same vein, taking that just a step further, what is the legacy that you hope to be creating with your creation of museum?

Speaker 3: 15:30

Oh, thank you for asking that, because I totally forgot to say that one of the most important missions of museum is we're going to, we're going to redefine storage because, as you know, storage in museums around the world is just closed off, mostly in a couple of very unique places it's more accessible, but mostly it's closed off. And we have the Matisse's and the Picasso's and the van Gogh's. They're in storage right, they're out of sight. And because of this feminist twist on art storage, because there's so much art by women to store right, we're going to first of all offer, to the best of our ability, storage space to the heirs of women artists who desperately need it right, who have been turned away by other institutions, who have nowhere to put it, who are at risk of it being stuck in a damp basement, which, by the way, I've seen and you know. So we are here to help rescue the artwork or at least a part of the estate right, to the best of our ability.

Speaker 3: 16:42

And secondly, museum wants to create a visible storage space. So those parts of storage that should be more closed off and protected, ie the smaller works that are more easily, let's say, stolen right, will be more enclosed. But we have been promised certain very large sculptures, like we're talking, really large sculptures. So we envision a visible storage unit that is visible 24-7, even when museum is closed to the public, and it just becomes a wonderful kind of a peak behind the scenes like night at the museum.

Speaker 3: 17:35

My other parent was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum and I would go with my dad to work as a child and we'd go through the storage area sometimes and there over there would be a Rodin study of the thinker, you know, with a big canvas drop cloth over his head, and that just always stayed with me and it made me comfortable about art or around art and I want everyone to have some measure of that experience right and to see behind the scenes and to see how fun it is, and I'm hoping that it will inspire children to think about a career in art, that this looks like fun.

Speaker 2: 18:20

What a wonderful experience to have had as a child with your father both your parents creating this window into the beauty and importance of art.

Speaker 3: 18:32

Well, thank you for saying so and yes, I'm very, very grateful to have had two such like hyper-cultured people who were also so charming and beautiful to look at. I was very, very blessed and I always make the joke because there are some photographs of me as a baby with my mother with her paintings behind us and she's holding me up and she's smiling, and I sort of have this really worried. Look on my little face, sort of like, oh my god, look at all these artworks. It's going to be my job, isn't it? And I think I wasn't too far off. So, basically, I have merely just come into my destiny, and it's always nice to know why you were put on this earth. So obviously, that's why and because I do suspect I was a birth accident, if you will, and maybe I might have been a painting or a sculpture that my mother would have done, but instead she chose it this way. And one last thing I'd like to say about Museum, which is that we are honored to surf the art history trend right now of the artist mother or mother artist, but it's usually they call it the artist mother, and this is, of course, a field of scholarship that is being pioneered by amazing people, especially in the United Kingdom, like Hedy Judah and other great authors like her, and it's just wonderful that people are realizing that women can just do it all.

Speaker 3: 20:19

And you're a great example of this too. So you're a mom to your dogs, but you're also a painter and a podcast host and an attorney and oh my god, what do you not do? And you're an activist and a philanthropist on top of it. So it's like an artist's mother is creative all the way around. That's something that finally is being celebrated. Instead of just sort of being a footnote to history, it's coming to the fore, and I know that one of Martha's architectural paintings on the flip side has a painting of me in the same color palette as a baby. So it's like the woman artist will just express herself and her love of her child, and that's amazing to see that the culture finally gets it and appreciates. So that's another aspect of Justin.

Speaker 2: 21:15

And I wonder if you would like to share any feedback you received or thoughts you had at the reception with your mother to celebrate your mother's exhibition.

Speaker 3: 21:27

Oh well, that's a lovely question. Thank you, I well, I will say that both she and I slept like rocks right after that. It was such a culmination of so many years of effort and determination on both our parts, and we also. We missed my dad, her husband George, but because he passed away in 2016. But on the whole, we couldn't have been happier.

Speaker 3: 21:57

We had so many women artists come and express support for Martha, including Christina Massey, who is an artist that I admire a lot and have written about, and it was just so meaningful to see other creatives come out to celebrate my mother as an artist, and so really, it literally was a dream come true. We owe that to the brilliant gallerist, david Richard, david Eichholz of David Richard Gallery. We're just delighted, and especially for me, I feel like, you know, if I was anyone else, I would just stop right there and maybe take a bubble bath and drink some herbal tea, which everybody's been urging me to do, but I haven't been able to do that in years. So, but because I'm me, I won't do that. I'm going to continue being a workaholic now on behalf of Museum, fulltime. I feel like Martha's OK now We've achieved justice for her in the art historic realm and now it's time to continue fighting for justice for all women artists all over the world.

Speaker 2: 23:15

You were going to read to us from an essay written specifically for your mother Martha Zabo's solo exhibition. Whenever you're ready.

Speaker 3: 23:27

Happy to thank you. Martha Zabo Painting the Sanctuary City 1957 to 2007, by Gwen F Chansett, phd curator, emerita Denver Art Museum. When you are housed high above the city, your world is at once spectacularly expansive and, at the same time, closed and protected. No wonder these paintings by Martha Zabo carry us into a duality that also describes the painter herself. The paintings executed from her safe, windowed view bring us a New York cityscape informed by a personal outlook. The choice to show the world from afar reveals much about the artist.

Speaker 3: 24:23

As an immigrant from Hungary in 1957, zabo delighted in her newfound freedom. Yet difficult memories of wartime internment in Austria and repressive life in post-war Hungary never allowed the artist to feel comfortably free. And as a woman in 1950s New York, she lacked the freedom her male contemporaries enjoyed. Her perch above the urban chaos gave her a quiet place to respond to what lay beyond and also to explore a variety of stylistic expressions within her self-imposed format. In this light, we might explore how, over some 60 years, and while continuing to produce other painted subjects, zabo consistently returned to the view outside her window. Even to this day, when the artist is in her 90s, these paintings are of domestic scale, not only appropriate for the artist, but also for those who would share her world as if looking through their own window. Traditional landscape paintings are often framed by side trees or other pictorial devices that draw a viewer into the distance. Here Zabo's own window provides the framing. The traditional horizontal view into a distant landscape is transformed into a dynamic cityscape, with some elements far away and others almost reachable from her sill. The window itself also serves the artistic device of a painting within a painting. Modernist precedents for painting from windows and for painted windows themselves are numerous Matisse's 1905 open window, collure Sonia and Robert de Lone's images of windows leading from color studies to non-objectivity and fair knowledge. City views from within and outside built environments all come to mind. No doubt the window provided Zabo a format for her own convenience and also a template for exploration within a consistent format.

Speaker 3: 26:50

Zabo was well educated and intentional about her training. In her native Hungary she studied at the University of the Fine Arts, budapest. Like many artists of her generation seeking the avant-garde, she planned to move to Paris. By the time she settled in New York at mid-century, it had supplanted Paris as the new center of modernism. Her education continued in New York in classes at the Art Students League. Her instructor, hananya Harari, was a prominent modernist who had studied with Fair Nong Leger. Harari was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists Group, a dominant artistic collective championing abstraction. Based on Mondrian and his followers, harari was active in myriad artistic projects.

Speaker 3: 27:45

With his encouragement, zabo experimented with styles from cubism and constructivism to expressionism, surrealism and even an Asian aesthetic. She was in touch with the latest modernist movements and she made them her own. Throughout her long career, she regularly visited museums and she lived in a culture-centric home lined with bookshelves her husband fashioned to accommodate their academic interests. Like many women artists of her time, she persevered without gallery representation, motivated by her own drive. Within her flat template for exploration, zabo's bold strokes of paint constructed an independent modernist vocabulary informed by cubism, phobism, expressionism, surrealism and the work of gifted American painters like Alfred Marr, william Glackens and Georgia O'Keeffe. From geometric architectonic formats to surreal fantasies that play out in atmospheric settings, these paintings describe a range of responses to her world. Zabo's self-limited format is the only constant in these paintings made over so many years, providing a framed view on which to project a full range of stylistic investigations, personal encounters, emotions and fantasies. In these paintings, we see effects of fog and snow, along with clouds and billowy smoke, all of which encouraged free form, abstraction and playful reflections of light and color. From a consistent viewpoint, these paintings are a visual record of the artist's dialogue between her closed, private world and the outside. Today we may consider these windowed paintings as a series, yet unlike the deliberate series of others like Claude Monet, rouen Cathedral and Haystacks, zabo never intended them as such.

Speaker 3: 30:03

Zabo painted in oil, using sure textural brush strokes to describe the built environment beyond her window. The layering of pigment at times becomes a kind of rectangular structure itself, almost like that of architectural bricks. In paintings such as Untitled Number 8, there is a focus on urban geometry where rooftops, chimneys and angular elements of other buildings create an interplay between solid geometric blocks and shadows projected across lighted snow. The Queensborough Bridge was a natural subject with its dynamic sculptural span. Queensborough Bridge and Fog shows the bridge majestically set in the foggy distance beyond nearby buildings. From 22 floors above the northeast corner of 1st Avenue and 81st Street, the colored light amidst fog calls to mind famed waterscapes of Monet. Though this view of the bridge is now obscured by newer buildings, the almost universal magnetism of bridges in the city still holds the pull that captured the imagination of other New York artists, such as Joseph Stella. Untitled Crimson Sunset reveals foggy architectural outlines that recall Monet's Parliament buildings and the huge red sun of Van Gogh's the Sower. Some paintings glowing with city lights make us wonder what might be going on deep in the city of lively urban partygoers, manhattan night, or domestic interiors only imagined behind lighted rectangular windows that shield their interiors and leave us with colored patterns of lights knit together by imposing dark rooftops. Untitled Brownstones Paintings such as untitled city lights one and two include specific circular reflections that find their place amidst other nocturnal illuminations, almost dancing like celestial globes.

Speaker 3: 32:21

In fact, these reflections derive from a specific lamp in the artist's home, a modernist lollipop lamp whose lit design element here mixes with the lights of the city below. Other paintings become surrealist fantasies where architectural forms take on lives of their own. In the artist's private place, smoke transforms into mesmerizing anthropomorphic figures that frolic across her view, beyond reach but ever present. In paintings like untitled apricot sunset, the shadows of architectural elements become animated, surreal figures. The anthropomorphized forms in neon city and the souls of transformed buildings celebrating remind us of grand sculptures from 19th century public parks. Heroic female figures that here hold up against the brilliant sky, some dramatically framed against the lit tall building. Strong allegorical figures pictured in Karoi Lutz's frescoed ceiling in the Budapest University Fine Arts building have also been noted as possible precedents when shadows become figures, as those in La Vida Esueña for Keldarón.

Speaker 3: 33:47

Her canvases may even conjure the theatrically themed paintings of Honoré Domier. Sabo's foreground shapes also are not unlike the shadowy cypress trees seen in van Gogh's starry night, painted from his view from the east-facing window within the asylum at Saint-Rémy. In viewing natural forms such as cypress trees with otherworldly features was a constant for van Gogh. Sabo's paintings also encourage the imaginary to overtake the specific, conjuring her own ethereal figures. Informed by both earlier modernist precedents and the distinct view from her window, sabo's rich paintings are totally her own. As a group. They showcase a remarkable variety within the artist's self-imposed restrictions of place and within the planar rectangular format.

Speaker 3: 34:54

Unlike her early European experience, when she was forcibly removed from normal daily life, this isolated position is on her own terms. Over the years, as urban changes took place, some buildings were obscured by others, with alterations of light that accompany structural additions and replacements. Yet these paintings are never mere recording. We don't trace specific changes, though these views were a constant for her. The paintings are primarily cityscapes of imagination, a masterful record of place in lively dialogue between the external world and inward expression.

Speaker 3: 35:44

In front of that glass divide, she could experiment with artistic inventiveness, project her own self within the format or play out a wondrous fantasy. This body of work, painted from such a distance, becomes a nexus of forms transformed by Sabo's imagination. Up some 22 floors above the fraca of urban life, one is within a world of one's own right for fantasy. Some architectural details may not have been important to those who designed them, knowing how little they would be seen, yet they provide fodder for imagination. Ethereal lighted shadows transcend the specifics in Sabo's private reveries, played out in a modernist vocabulary. Considering that these astonishing paintings were made during decades of change and urban upheaval, one expects it must have been a comfort each time to return a new to her personal urban oasis to build what her daughter Julia has called a sanctuary city amidst the changing skyline.

Speaker 2: 37:09

Kathleen Hulser, welcome to Work there of Art and Law. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Speaker 1: 37:14

Hi, stephanie, it's great to be here and it's really wonderful to have an opportunity to talk about some of these interesting projects that surround us, and one of the things that's noticeable in the world that we live in is that while the news and the media and the kind of art world coverage is often dominated by a few familiar names, there's this huge landscape of other things going on, and that's really what interests me the most. So my background is, as I was trained as an American historian. I've taught American history for a long time not art history, but history history and I was a curator at the New York Historical Society for a very long time where I did some shows. I worked with a big team on three big shows on slavery in the North, worked on a civil war show, grant Lee. But perhaps most relevant to this is two shows that I did that are close to the work of Martha Zabo, the artist we're going to talk about shortly, and one of those shows was called Up on the Roof, which is also the title of the exhibition of Martha Zabo's work that's up now in New York at the David Richard gallon.

Speaker 1: 38:35

And Up on the Roof was about life on New York City's rooftops. So I spent a lot of time thinking about what was up there and it ranged from everything to laundry lines and hopscotch games and people playing poker at night with a tub of ice and bottles of beer in it, to pigeon flying. You know flying pigeons used to be a big New York City custom and you know using it as tar beach to get a tan, possibly nude, with one of the neighbors in the higher building with their binoculars trained on the roof. So my curating experience allowed me to do things which were kind of fun and in line with a series of interests that I have, which is I'm interested in things that are lesser known and perhaps lesser thought about or overlooked somehow, and so the Up on the Roof was an example of people have done paintings and art and history about the urban environment, but that's a particular unseen, kind of secret environment up there, so lesser known.

Speaker 1: 39:51

One of the other projects that I've worked on for a long time and I'm still working with is a project about the history of incarcerated girls, and there was an institution for girls UV as we call it, juvenile detention facility upstate in Hudson, new York, with a fantastic view and a sort of dark history of girls that were sent there Not having done anything wrong.

Speaker 1: 40:19

Sometimes, if you were being sexually abused within your family, child Protective Services which had a different name back then would take you and send you away. You know, instead of like doing something to the perpetrator, they take the victim and send them away. And so, with the team of this project called incorrigibles, headed and founded by Allison Corner, we investigated the history of this particular place, which closed and opened at the turn of the century, in 1904, and closed in the mid-70s, and we found out that the stories of these girls were ones that were very much intertwined with social attitudes towards women. So it's like the history of incarceration tracked the history of patriarchal and discriminatory attitudes towards young women and especially their sexuality. So, anyway, that was the incorrigibles project which brought me into this realm of saying let's look at the things that we don't talk about, let's look at the underside, let's look for how the world that we know actually has this other, shadowy side, which is what we don't know.

Speaker 2: 41:39

Yeah, that's fascinating, and it really does bring me to then ask you about your involvement with Mizzium.

Speaker 1: 41:48

So the Mizzium spelled M-S Museum like the title, ms is an idea that was born in the head of Julia Zabo, who was involved for the quite a few years and trying to get the work of her mother who is now 95, seen Martha Zabo's work. She produced it over a very long and productive career of painting, but she's really rather under known and the Martha's Abel story represents something that is at the heart of the museum's mission, which is that just because people are unknown doesn't mean they aren't worth seeing, and there's a sort of generational thing going on, which is people of the age of Martha Zabo at 95 are women, who often missed what, in the contemporary world view, now at least have some ability for women to be shown. It's not exactly an equal, fair and level playing field in the art world, but it's much, much more likely that women will be recognized much earlier in their careers for the work that they're doing as artists. Whereas for someone born when Martha Zabo was 95 years ago, when she was at the peak of her prowess, and if she had perhaps been a white man, she might have been recognized as part of generational movements in the art world and so on, she instead was pretty well overlooked and ignored. So the museum wants to pick up on this lost generation. So that's one little piece of the museum's mission, but the main mission is to discover and present the work of overlooked female artists at whatever stage of their life they may be at old or young, and to also present this work in ways and a context which allows access to a much broader public.

Speaker 1: 44:01

So being rather distant from the central ruling regime of the art world in which a celebrity is closely associated with markability. The museum will certainly ignore those kind of standards and the standards that are enunciated by an array of in-house art history experts, and instead focus on the ways in which the work speaks on its own, on its own merits. And speaking of speaking, one of the things that's going to be distinctive about this museum is that it wants to emphasize ways in which we can broaden the experience of art so setting it in the outdoors, sometimes, having pieces being touchable, having things that are audio, that work for people who are unsighted, having things that can have a feel, a texture, so the art can be experienced as something for the visually impaired, for the hearing impaired, for people who are not educated in the refinements and the codes and the preferences of the art world, hopefully accessible to a broader public. So right now the museum is in the formation stage, but one of the features of the site, which is the old family home and land of Martha Zabo and Julia Zabo one of the features of the site in the Catskills is that it's on one of the main roads. There's not that many roads when you get into the western Catskills and the main road that goes through it is route 23. And so it's on the main road, so it's kind of findable. But it has 20 acres, very nice acres.

Speaker 1: 46:03

So the project will start in the outdoor setting rather than starting with the building, since it will take a while to get the building going, and so there'll be an emphasis on art that interacts with the environment, things that are three-dimensional, that you can walk around and things that you can do engagement, the kind of conceptual art projects where you might have a kind of discovery path or environment and sustainability pieces.

Speaker 1: 46:36

Statues One of the initial plans is for some statues that depict the women veterans who are part of the overlooked when you look at the whole sort of genre of the public historical statue, the thing that you don't usually find as women. I mean, if you look around New York the paucity of women and sculptures it's really striking. That's one reason why they just did those figures of women's rights pioneers in Central Park, because there was an overwhelming white men general kind of theme to the bronze that we can see spread across New York City's landscape. So the museum idea, its mission, is for overlooked female artists and expanding audiences by using all the senses as part of the art experience, without any requirement that one have a cultivated art history background or a well-educated appreciation of art as it's seen by the art world itself.

Speaker 2: 47:52

My understanding is you are working as the executive director and chief curator, is that right? And so what's your role in scope in this?

Speaker 1: 48:04

Well, my role since this museum is projected so far, my role so far has been to really think and talk about how to develop the idea, and so we've done an interesting conference presentation about architecture on the outside, the invisible nature of built structure and form, and a good deal of what my effort has been going towards has been developing an intellectual framework which situates us within this dissenting tradition of the relationship of margins and center the periphery. So we're not at war with the art world, but we definitely are dissenters in that we disagree with a lot of premises of how things are put together. So for me as a curator, that means I might not follow. I'm a historian but I wouldn't.

Speaker 1: 49:14

I don't usually curate with chronology, which is the traditional way to do it. This happened, that happened, that happened one caused the other. I curate much more with thematic juxtapositions and I love using material culture in relationship to art. I see the built environment and the material world as all part of something that could be an aesthetic experience and that is again in keeping with the mission of the museum to present art in a way that gives us insight and opens the doors to new worlds, that it touches the soul and it affects the spirit and its relationship to the world is that we see, we feel, we experience with a sense of awe and wonder. We don't bring our preconceptions and prejudices in. Rather, we let the world affect us.

Speaker 2: 50:20

And that actually is a perfect segue talking about going back to Martha Zabo and how her environment changed from when she left Europe during Soviet-occupied Hungary's issues and came to New York City and how the cityscape impacted her and her art. Would you speak to that?

Speaker 1: 50:41

Martha Zabo has a totally fascinating history, and it's one of both tragedy and triumph. She overcame experiences that marked the whole generation that was born just before World War II. As a young Hungarian woman in the Austro-Hungarian Empire of Jewish origins, she was put as a teenager into a labor camp near Vienna. So she experienced the Holocaust in a very dramatic personal way. She interrupted. It stopped her ability to do art. She was already drawing and painting when she was very young and after World War II, living in Hungary, she did get a chance to go to art school, but it was an extremely repressive environment.

Speaker 1: 51:34

After the Soviets came in after World War II, in Hungary there was a revolt. The cry of the people for freedom and autonomy could not be suppressed, and so there was a Hungarian revolt against the Soviet domination, and so she and her husband, george Zabo, who was himself an art historian and archaeologist, came to the US in 1957. So she started again from scratch and rebuilt herself, and you can see in this talented and very strong woman a core of creativity that just couldn't be kept down, even given these very difficult circumstances that she had to overcome. So when she came to New York and I think perhaps the earliest painting that's on view here is from 1959. And her work in the 50s and the 60s is a very large body of these views of the rooftop. They were living in a penthouse on the east side with a view of the Queensborough bridge. So the work called Rooftop Dance, number five, is from 1959. And it's done in very subtle tones of black and white and gray and it features some dancing figures, very, very skinny, shadowy silhouettes, which is the kind of figurative work she does in relationship to the rooftop set of works. And they are arranged gracefully on a rooftop where the audience is. Perhaps you can interpret it as the audience is a bunch of pipes and chimney pots.

Speaker 1: 53:33

So one of the things I really appreciate about Martha Zabo's work in these cityscapes is that she's completely tuned in to the unseen and the unintentional. So usually the city is just chock full of architects' visions. When you walk down a street in New York you feel what the architects want you to feel. It's kind of imposed. But the roofscapes are unintentional cityscapes and they're random and unfinished. They're accretions of utilitarian stop, from chimney pots to cell phone repeaters and, back in the day, leftover TV antennas and gawky stairway entries. And then of course there is the magnificent and awesome tribe of water towers that stolidly grip the skyline, in which you see a silhouette marching up and down New York if you're ever up on the roof.

Speaker 1: 54:34

And I've often thought that Martha Zabo's work just keys in wonderfully to the unseen and the unintentional nature of these rooftops. And when I first encountered her work I sort of one of my questions was do you want some people with those buildings? And indeed in this you know landscape that is so often unpopulated, she actually brings shadowy projections of people back some of the time. So you know, there's a sense in which the rooftops are haunted and they're haunted by the silhouettes of people who come out, shadow figures, wraiths, that you would never see unless you're an artist with an enormous imagination, projecting a human world just lightly draped over that unpopulated roof skate. And so these balustrades, the walls up on the roofs, have often a freeze of people that we never see in distinct dream projections, shadow people.

Speaker 1: 55:51

So my appreciation for Martha's work is very much rooted in the depth and originality of her vision of what the secret nighttime rooftop is like. And when I think about the idea of being haunted, I think that, like Martha Szabo, you can read in the work some of the past of this oppression and difficulty and the Holocaust and the shadows of her experience. She's haunted by her experience in the forced labor camps of Nazi Vienna, in the brutal post war repression of the Hungarian revolt in 1956. And there she is liberated, doing art, painting, which expresses her soul but also expresses her joy at being able to do something with her creativity. That you really get a sense of her soul is unlocked by these implausible, unintentional environments up in the sky.

Speaker 2: 57:06

Do you, I believe, were recently at the opening reception for this solo exhibition of Martha Szabo's work? Did you have the opportunity to hear from any others about the feedback from the show, that what they were taking away from it?

Speaker 1: 57:24

Well, I think you know what the commentary that I heard. It was sort of interesting because it's always a random assortment of people who come for openings and there were some who were like appreciative of the quality of her compositions. That are the formal compositions, are things that tell you very much that she had some training and sort of a modernist background of stripping art down to its building blocks and examining those building blocks and in her hands that geometry is expressed very much in the interplay of buildings and then different shapes that are on the horizon. An interesting example of that might be there's several paintings she works in oil usually and there's several paintings that look downtown and that penthouse where she lives has a view of the Seagram building and she has several views of the Seagram building that are marvelous because the Seagram building is an icon of majestic angular modernism but in her view it's blurred and softened in the distance. So, for example, in the painting called La Vida a Sueno, or Life is a Dream, you can, there's actual curtains, so it's making it clear that this is kind of almost like a stage Looking out over the city is a performance that's done for us or the artist herself and on the stage. You can see in the foreground are a couple of daily suggested silhouettes of figures like Freese on the bow straight, of those wraiths who come out on the roof when we're not there to see them, and then in the distance is the softened and blurred outline of the Seagram building.

Speaker 1: 59:28

Another one that I think is very cool is done not from the high rooftop but from a lower brownstone rooftop, and a couple of those in the show are from the 60s and they feature beautiful the angles from a low roof and they feature the diagonal geometry. You see where you have the inexorable grid of New York City, uptown avenues and cross town streets, and that grid is kind of broken when you look at it from the rooftop and you look down diagonally and you see the street cutting across the canvas and then these brownstones that are done in luscious muted brown, umber and earth tones, or in one there's a row of windows which are alternating and just abstracted and just suggested, and some of them are orange and some of them are seafoam and you get the sense of a city which has a pulsing life. Behind the windows, behind the brownstone walls and the brick walls, that there's always a beat of the rhythm of daily life going on there, even as the city's geometry dominates the visual field.

Speaker 2: 1:00:56

You have such a you've created such a compelling argument for why anyone who is in the New York City area should go and visit the show.

Speaker 1: 1:01:09

I think it's a really wonderful show and it has a distinctive sensibility and again, her theme of these unintentional you know, the no architect touch, this composition kind of thing I think the unintentionality of this rooftop theme is really one that makes the work distinctive.

Speaker 1: 1:01:33

In addition to her considerable prowess in oil and color, I mean, her artistic chops are really strong and you can see it perhaps even more so in the portraits which are not part of this particular display.

Speaker 1: 1:01:50

But she did a lot. She used to go to the life drawing classes at the art student league and she has a wonderful way of portraits. It's like she's somebody whose mind and soul are very open to the world. So she sees older, nude, older women and Latino men and people from all walks of life who are the models there and she just sees them into them so deeply and she would, rather than drawing, she would paint an oil at these sessions at the art students league. So there's a very large quantity of these distinctive and compelling portraits that offer not just an array of New York's diverse people young, old, beautiful, not so traditionally beautiful and marked by their urban lives, that she's got that whole array of portraits in her repertoire. That contrasts very much with the, the rooftop and urban view series, but yet both have that very strong use of color and composition and very confident brushwork.

Speaker 2: 1:03:11

Going back to your thought about the mission behind Museum and also exhibitions like this one of Martha Zabo's work, how would you hope that the conversation might shift about the social attitudes towards women and women artists going forward in light of these kinds of exhibitions and museum?

Speaker 1: 1:03:36

Well, I think, actually, the art world is in a moment in which some of the more stringent and exclusionary codes are breaking down. So it's wonderful to know the greats of art history and it's wonderful to see the work of the artists who are the top rated A-list artists that are so often on display in the large museums. But that background needs to be put together with the ability to open ourselves to seeing in new ways and experiencing in new ways. I think Martha Zabo's work and the museum mission is one that really allows us to find this new point of view and allows us to plunge ourselves into a world of unknown experiences as we look at overlooked and unknown artists.

Speaker 2: 1:04:31

Yeah, and it jumps out at me looking at this in terms of bringing historical justice to the artists like Martha Zabo, would you agree?

Speaker 1: 1:04:48

Yes, yes, there certainly is a theme of justice. We say the arc of justice is very long, but we may be at the point at which we I don't know, I guess I'm not as enough of a I'm not a polly in a so I do imagine that everything is going to become a marvelous new landscape of the acceptance of the unknown and the joy for celebration of people who were previously ignored. Nevertheless, the trends in our society and the way museum curating is going are bending towards opening the doors to more of these new things. So is there a trend towards perhaps some historical justice and some restoration of a broader set of values and broader sets of ways of looking?

Speaker 2: 1:05:54

Yes, Well, thank you so much, Kathleen. Is there anything that I have not asked you that you would like to share?

Speaker 1: 1:06:05

I think people like David Richard Gallery in Chelsea at 508 West 26th Street because people like David Richard, who runs a couple of spaces in that big Chelsea art building, is a visionary in terms of him searching out people who are lesser known and he has the intelligence and confidence to trust his own instincts and to say, okay, these are not the certified great artists, but these are things that I want to draw your attention to, and he goes to those artists and he presents them in exhibitions and he's bold and he's risk taking and he doesn't worry about you know what critic ABC is going to say about it. He is somebody there who really has a connection with how the world of creativity can possibly be, not how it's always been said to be.

Speaker 2: 1:07:07

There will be links in the show notes to learn more. If you're intrigued by this podcast, it would be much appreciated if you'd leave a rating for review and tag Warfare of Art in a podcast Until next time. This is Stephanie Drotti bringing you Warfare of Art and Law. Thank you so much for listening and remember injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.