Spanning paintings, furniture and ceramics, Mary Heilmann’s contribution to contemporary art needn’t be overlooked. Born in San Francisco in 1940, Heilmann made work and a living as an artist during a time when women artists were mostly ignored and has been called “one of the most important abstract painters of her generation.”
I have two images of Mary Heilmann. The first comes courtesy of Norman Rockwell. He painted it for a cover of the Saturday Evening Post, and I know that’s corny, but the timing is right and Rockwell’s pitch is perfect. So I always think of Mary as that schoolgirl in pigtails sitting on a bench outside the principal’s office with an enormous black eye and a smile of sly triumph on her lips. In my lexicon, that’s Mary. She was that girl then and she is that woman now. The atmosphere of that sly smile brightens the offhand insouciance of her paintings; it enhances their tomboy dishabille and inflects their self-possession with an impish kind of glee. The first thing I know, in fact, when I see one of Mary’s paintings, is that, however daunted I might feel standing in front of it, Mary is happy with it. Whatever it cost, she considers it worth the price, and whatever it means, it does mean something. It’s not just a design or another “contribution to the discourse” but something more like a glyph or a graffiti tag on a stucco wall, a private mark whose very opacity bears with it a promise of the artist’s perfect candor.
My second image of Mary is a real one, a story she tells of being a Catholic schoolgirl forced by the demands of hipster fashion to shop at an ecclesiastical clothing store for black nun’s stockings so that she and her fiends could masquerade as beatniks in the bars and coffeehouses of San Francisco and listen to poetry and jazz. This, of course, is a classic strategy of improvisational rebellion. When at a loss for defining what’s new, one simply appropriates the local iconography of power to serve a subversive agenda - the way British Invasion rockers appropriated Victorian cavalry jackets, the way Black Panthers affected fatigues, and the way punk rockers sported business suits. It is also the way Mary Heilmann would ultimately appropriate the august historical discourse of geometric abstraction.
Excerpt taken from David Hickey’s essay: “Mary Mary Surfing on Acid”
Video Interview // Frieze Interview
