Jerilyn Jurinek

STORY 

As it says in my bio, I am a female artist in a dangerous time. I have become that, among what I should have thought were friends and allies, but were not.  At the time when the art world bluntly announced that “painting was dead,” I received my MFA in painting from Columbia University. Next I sidestepped the political feminist art organizations after an attempt to be a part of it, writing for a newsletter and heading a committee.  Then I tried writing for an art and jazz magazine, which published one issue. I curated a painting show in the US Courthouse for the Organization of Independent Artists.  In the Aldrich Center I helped title our group show” Synthesis of a complex Simplicity.” But the art world became increasingly conceptual in taste. It had already split between the Duchamp line and the traditional mode as professed by the Averys, the de Koonings and then precariously followed by Pearlstein and Katz, Resika and Kahn. Another line more expressionist and less formal was professed by Snyder, Rothenberg and K. Smith.  I was still learning. I wanted an architectural truth, a canonical memory that would inform my research for the next thirty years.  Lonely and difficult, because no one around me clearly shared that ambition, I worked on. I was free. Still I sold work through a corporate gallery. Steven Harvey, their salesman, placed a few works on paper, one in The Chemical Bank in the World Trade Center.

By the 1990s I was articulating a view on art as I taught a galleries and museums class throughout Manhattan through the Stuyvesant Adult Center. Down in the streets of Soho I discussed the scene while as the “artist upstairs” I developed an art and philosophy that had little resemblance to what I saw. I was selling privately, and started drawing the figure at Spring Studio, that bohemian haven run by Minerva Durham, where I also posed. I owe much to that experience. Later I taught there for 14 years (2004-2018). I also taught collage for 5 years at Cooper Union (2003-2008).

I had seen people falling from the Trade Towers alongside debris, swaying with in a deathly rhythm. It challenged me to paint a narrative, one to which the world could relate.  The Bible? Too divisive. The fight for freedom and self rule? Ding! Ding! Ding. That hit the mark. And so after reading history a few years, in 2006 I painted about the American Revolutionary period, the 1770s to the 1790s. The separation from England: a new thing in the world, no monarch, strongman, dictator, no empire, a governmental form post tribal and post religious.

Starting January 2001 I taught a drawing course in Theatre Arts at Mason Gross School of the Arts in Rutgers University. My education in theatre began. By 2011, I was showing these paintings at the New York Public Library and producing a reading Presidential Love Letters on Valentine’s Day which led to a fledgling play based on letters between Jefferson and Adams. We were the American Crisis Players. We performed until 2017 in churches: First Presbyterians’ 300th anniversary, the NYPL all around the town, and community centers. Two solo exhibitions accompanied two of the play dates. For a year or more, from 2015-17 I published a newsletter, The Urgent Unguent, (an urgently needed ointment or salve,) to show the relationship of visual art to all the other disciplines in the life of the people.

History is not the favorite thing of the art world. There it is a settled argument in favor of one side of the ‘political’ spectrum. To address the art audience, with ”our” history is impossible even for the sake of disinterested reflection. Philip Pearlstein was appalled by my choice. (I posed for him for 9 years) He wondered why I wasn’t in a gallery. Not only was I not choosing a modernist disdain for subject, or narrative, but I was trapsing into what he saw as the politically incorrect subject matter, even while I have no interest in politics in art or history.

But I didn’t take the women’s politics as subject matter either.  It had only been digested as a simple conflict of parts: male/female. There I never find a ground. I would leave that to policy operatives. I would apply my female tools to the whole culture and see what emerged, trust my instincts, intuition and love of humanity.

By 2017 the world was interested in it’s history, even in America. Broadway shows, even. I let go. The job was done. I had done enough. Whatever ground we broke will probably not be recognized, but our little troupe of players presented what Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had to say to each other and to us after a reflective time, after their political lives, their accomplishment, the problems religious doctrines had imposed, the benefits of spiritual practice and what remained to be done by free people. They discussed how the benefits of science freed the mind for reflection on the “ art” of government.  

This was a tremendous period of learning and it taught this: that all is art. There may be science to it, philosophy to it, but each discipline is ultimately an art.  So the nightmare that painting is dead, raised science to art’s sole purpose. The digital age finished the job of stripping physical things of meaning, or of working at craft.

I belong to two artist groups, The New York Society of Women Artists and the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors.  I have identified my gift and role as helping to know and honor their histories and have worked toward that for several years.

Since I studied Italian at the U. of Chicago in my senior year at SAIC, and my month in Italy in 1969, I have identified a number of reasons to go back to Italy to redeem my artistic inheritance from the Renaissance: artists of my sensibility, the writers of history and culture of my sensibility and to work in Italy enjoying the light. I returned in 2013. I have read Mary McCarthy on the Stones of Florence, Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories and many of Burckhardt’s histories and civilization books on Italy, Greece, the Age of Constantine. And so I have filled in the knowledge only pointed to in modern art school, but so far from American art and culture. I treasure Alberti’s Auto-portrait of the Artist, and Vasari illustrating artist traits and visions through apocryphal tales of artists’ lives, written like bible stories.