Ann Agee (born 1959) is an American visual artist whose practice centers on ceramic art, ceramic figurines, objects and installations, hand-painted wallpaper drawings, and sprawling exhibitions that merge installation art, domestic environment and showroom.
[Wei, Lilly]
"Ann Agee,"
''Art in America'', March 28, 2011. Retrieved February 27, 2020.[Kreimer, Julian]
"Ann Agee,"
''Art in America'', June 3, 2015. Retrieved February 26, 2020.[Viladas, Pilar]
''The New York Times Magazine'', December 26, 1999, p. 45–50. Retrieved February 26, 2020. Her art celebrates everyday objects and experiences, decorative and utilitarian arts, and the dignity of work and craftsmanship, engaging issues involving gender, labor and fine art with a subversive, feminist stance.
[Hirsch, Faye. "Ann Agee at Arena," ''Art in America'', March 1995.][McClister, Nell]
"Ann Agee,"
''Artforum'', March 1, 2011. Retrieved February 26, 2020.[Sherlock, Maureen P. "Quotidian: Ann Agee's New Work", ''Quotidian'', New York: Yoshii Gallery, 1996.][Liu, Catherine. "The Humanities and Artisanal Education: Technocrats and Artisans in the Contemporary University," ''College Literature'', Spring 2015, p. 280–310.] Agee's work fits within a multi-decade shift in American art in which ceramics and considerations of craft and domestic life rose from relegation to second-class status to recognition as "serious" art.
[Wei, Lilly]
"Claytime! Ceramics Finds Its Place in the Art-World Mainstream,"
''ARTnews'', January 15, 2014. Retrieved February 27, 2020.[Smith, Roberta]
''The New York Times'', March 19, 2009. Retrieved February 26, 2020.[Shaffner, Ingrid. "Ann Agee," i]
''Dirt on Delight: Impulses that Form Clay''
by Ingrid Shaffner, Janelle Porter and Glenn Adamson, Philadelphia, PA: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2009. Retrieved February 26, 2020. She first received critical attention in the influential and divisive "Bad Girls (art exhibition), Bad Girls" exhibition,
[Tucker, Marcia (ed)]
''Bad Girls''
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994. Retrieved February 26, 2020. curated by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum in 1994, where she installed a functional, handmade ceramic bathroom, rendered in the classic blue-and-white style of Delftware.
[Hirsch, Faye]
"Unalienated Labor: Q+A with Ann Agee,"
''Art in America'', October 5, 2012. Retrieved February 26, 2020.[Smith, Roberta]
''The New York Times'', January 21, 1994, p. C5. Retrieved February 26, 2020.[Jones, Amelia (ed.)]
''The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader''
New York: Routledge, 2010. Retrieved February 27, 2020. ''Art in America'' critic Lilly Wei describes Agee's later work as "the mischievous, wonderfully misbegotten offspring of sculpture, painting, objet d'art, and kitschy souvenir."
Agee has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from Anonymous Was A Woman Award, Anonymous Was A Woman, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, among others.
[''Artforum'']
"2011 Guggenheim Fellows Announced,"
April 7, 2011. Retrieved February 26, 2020.[Anonymous Was a Woman]
"Award Recipients."
Retrieved February 26, 2020. Her work has been collected by institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and Philadelphia Museum of Art.
[Brooklyn Museum]
"Ann Agee,"
Collection. Retrieved March 5, 2020.[John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation]
"Ann Agee,"
Fellows. Retrieved February 26, 2020.[Philadelphia Museum of Art]
Collections. Retrieved February 26, 2020. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
[Dube, Ilene]
"Ceramic ware exhibit 'Beyond Function' now showing in Princeton,"
''WHYY/PBS'', May 12, 2015. Retrieved February 26, 2020.
Early life and career
Agee was born in Philadelphia in 1959.
Her mother, Sally Agee, earned an art degree at Syracuse University and exhibited art late in life; her treatment of the home as an ongoing project—rearranging furniture, painting floral designs on bathroom walls or an Abstract expressionism, Abstract Expressionist action-work on the floor—had a strong influence on Ann.
[Chute, James]
"Artist's work is rooted in humility,"
''San Diego Union'', September 9, 2011. Retrieved February 26, 2020. Agee studied at the Cooper Union School of Art (BFA, 1981) and Yale School of Art (MFA, 1986) and earned prizes for painting at both.
Despite this, she felt stifled by the male-dominated, painting-centric culture at Yale, which conferred presumed status and seriousness on painting over other forms of expression.
[Noey, Christopher]
''The Artist Project: What Artists See When They Look at Art''
New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017, p. 18–9. Retrieved March 1, 2020. She turned to work in clay in 1985, drawn by its feel, greater connection to the world, provisional status, and potential as a medium she could lay claim to as a woman.
Agee learned ceramics through experimentation and self-study, aided by grants that allowed her to buy a kiln and produce the work for her first solo show (Ann Nathan Gallery, Chicago, 1991).
Fellowships at the Wisconsin-based ceramics manufacturer, Kohler Co., and a plumbing fixture factory in Guanajuato, Mexico from 1991 to 1993 influenced her practice and thought about craft, labor and production and enabled her to pursue large projects, including a hand-painted, ceramic-tile public mural in Guanajuato and her bathroom installation in the "Bad Girls''"'' show''.
''
In the 1990s, Agee expanded her reputation through shows featuring her figurines, at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, New-York Historical Society and Brooklyn Museum, and solo exhibitions at the Arena and Yoshii (New York) and Rena Bransten (San Francisco) galleries.
[Kotik, Charlotta. ''Domestic Transformations'', Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1998.][Wallach, Amei. "Putting Yourself in Artists Places, Rooms with Views, Ann Agee at Arena," ''New York Newsday'', October 1994.][Levin, Kim. "Voice Choices, Ann Agee/Julie Tragger at Yoshii," ''Village Voice'', July 26, 1994.] In the 2000s, she was selected for major group exhibitions at LACMA ("Color and Fire: Defining moments in studio ceramics 1950 to 2000"),
[Lauria, Jo, et al]
''Color and Fire: Defining Moments in Studio Ceramics, 1950-2000''
New York: Rizzoli, July 7, 2000. the Katonah Art Museum ("Conversations in Clay," 2008),
[Kardon, Janet. "Ann Agee," ''Conversations in Clay'', Katonah, NY: Katonah Museum of Art, 2008.] Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and Walker Art Museum ("Dirt on Delight," 2009),
[Katz, Jill]
"ICA Receives AICA/USA Award for Best Show in a University Gallery,"
''Penn Today'', February 17, 2010. Retrieved February 26, 2020. and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts ("The Female Gaze," 2013).
[Epstein, Edward M]
"'…That Women Tend To Make': The Female Gaze at the Pennsylvania Academy,"
''Artcritical'', February 6, 2013. Retrieved February 26, 2020. She has had solo exhibitions at P.P.O.W. Gallery (New York), Locks Gallery (Philadelphia), and Lux Art (California), among others.
[Hirsch, Faye. "Ann Agee at P.P.O.W.," ''Art in America'', February 2006.][Huffman, Sarah]
"Modeling Creativity,"
''Fine Magazine'', V. 6, Issue 9, 2011, p. 34–6. Retrieved February 26, 2020.
Work
Agee's art disrupts distinctions between art and craft, the decorative and the utilitarian.
She commemorates work, the bodily, and aspects of ordinary life, such as domestic objects, chores, environments and narratives, factory labor and hand-craft, industrial processes, and consumer packaging.
Writers and curators suggest her work draws on—and recuperates—decorative arts across several centuries (often discovered from museum study), such as 17th-century, Asian-influenced Delftware, 18th-century Meissen porcelain, Meissen figurines and French textiles, and Rococo ornamentation, as well as Modernism, modernist and Pop art appropriation and industrial ceramic techniques.
[Cotter, Holland]
"Review: Ann Agee and Julie Trager at Yoshii Gallery,"
''The New York Times'', August 5, 1994, p. C19. Retrieved February 26, 2020.[Tannenbaum, Judith and Marion Boulton Stroud. ''On the Wall: Contemporary Wallpaper'', Providence, RI: Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, 2003.][Mahany, Alexander]
"10 Cool Trends in Contemporary Ceramic Art,"
''ARTnews'', June 9, 2014. Retrieved February 26, 2020.[Metropolitan Museum of Art]
Ann Agee
The Artist Project, Season 3. Retrieved February 26, 2020.
Agee engages these traditions and materials with an irreverent, feminist stance that incorporates her personal experience, particularly around work and gender issues, such as the juggling of artist, mother, homemaker and producer roles, the division of labor, and the conceptualizing of craft skill in relation to art.
Agee's main areas of production are ceramic installations, objects, figurines and tableaux, hand-painted "wallpaper drawings," and expansive installations that feature combinations of each of those types of work.
Early ceramic installations and objects
''Lake Michigan Bathroom'' (1994), a lavishly ornamented, functional bathroom (sink, toilet, bidet, urinal and water fountain) created at Kohler, brought Agee her first major attention through the "Bad Girls" exhibition.
[Bless, Nancy. "Bathing Beauty," ''Metropolis'', March 1994, p. 32.][Koplos, Janet. "Ann Agee at P.P.O.W." ''Art in America'', July 2002.] Its hand-made fixtures and back-wall mosaic tiles feature ornate patterns, diagrams and images delicately rendered in the blue-and-white style of Delftware.
[Isaacs, Deanna]
"Expo Chicago 2018: See it now,"
''Chicago Reader'', September 29, 2018. Retrieved February 27, 2020. The imagery offers what ''Metropolis'' calls, "a François Rabelais, Rabelaisian tour" of the flows of the water supply through cities, factories and home, connecting the body, public and private functions, and the architectural and anatomical.
[Slesin, Suzanne]
"Oh, So Traditional; Oh, So Subversive,"
''The New York Times'', November 5, 1992, p. C1. Retrieved February 26, 2020. Agee's other, early large-scale ceramic works include a 21' by 10' ceramic-tile mural immortalizing Kohler factory workers (1991–2) and the full bathroom, ''Sheboygan Men’s Room'' (1998), commissioned by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Kohler Arts Center.
[John Michael Kohler Arts Center]
"Sheboygan Men's Room,"
Collections. Retrieved March 1, 2020.
After her move to New York in 1993, Agee turned to smaller-scale work.
This work includes porcelain, tchotchke-like objects, styled with chinoiserie patterns of birds, flowers and butterflies, which on closer inspection are revealed to be sex toys.
[Nahas, Dominique. "Ann Agee," ''Review'', October 15, 1996.][Johnson, Ken]
"'Confrontational Clay' -– 'The Artist as Social Critic',"
''The New York Times'', March 9, 2001, p. E36. Retrieved February 26, 2020. Her Arena Gallery solo show (1995) paid tribute to everyday life, work and anonymous craftsmanship through ornate platters featuring factory workers and tile murals depicting placid suburban and factory scenes, framed by lush, decorative motifs.
Figurines
With the show "Quotidian" (1996, Yoshii Gallery), Agee turned another older idiom—ceramic figurines—to new uses; she paired them with hand-painted wallpapers, a combination she would pursue over the next two decades.
[''The New Yorker''. "On View," October 7, 1996.][Johnson, Ken]
''The New York Times'', January 15, 1999, p. E42. Retrieved February 26, 2020. The figurine genre originated in 17th-century Italian customs gracing wealthy desert tables with figurative tableaux made of sugar, which then evolved into Rococo ''commedia dell'arte'' and Meissen porcelain figures.
Agee pastiched them with hand-sculpted figures of carefully observed, conspicuously contemporary, lively Manhattanites.
[Arning, Bill. ''Ordinary Extraordinary'', Overland Park, KS: Johnson County Community College Gallery of Art, 1999.] Writer Maureen Sherlock calls the show "a tender catalogue of the unique phrasing and nuanced dressing of the battalions of women in the street" articulating the partial triumphs, daily struggles, and inventiveness of everyday life;
Dominique Nahas writes that each figure suggests its own world "with an almost Charles Baudelaire, Baudelairean concern with individuality of expression," which he compares to the observational Ashcan School paintings of John Sloan and George Bellows.
Agee's figurines were selected for Brooklyn Museum and other exhibitions
and commissioned for a six-page ''New York Times Magazine'' feature/fashion spread in 1999.
Agee next placed her figurines in multi-figure narrative tableaux, whose expressive postures, gestures and facial features portrayed ordinary rites of passage, manual labor, and domestic scenarios.
[Gladstone, Valerie. "Ann Agee," ''ARTNews'', November 2005.] Her 2001 solo show at P.P.O.W. presented five birth-focused sculptural tableaux, including ''Birth Class'', which features colorfully dressed, slightly giddy pregnant women and partners watching a couple and a midwife give a demonstration.
''Boxing in the Kitchen'' (2005) consists of a surreal pink landscape set on a custom, twelve-foot-long table and populated with meticulously painted terra cotta figurines acting out domestic fantasies of play and transformation: women boxing, a man impersonating ''Don Giovanni'', an acrobat, a father reading to children.
In the later 2000s, Agee's ceramic work increasingly turned to fanciful figurines, rococo-like statuary and domestic objects—dishes, platters, vases, sinks—that toy with notions of functionality through purposeful imperfections.
''Artforum'' compares the dense, decorative layered imagery on the vases to the Surrealism, Surrealist "refraction of the unconscious and the everyday";
Lilly Wei describes the figurines as "earthy, lively, both sardonic and goofily sweet, updated ''commedia dell'arte'' types";
This work—often solid white and appearing silhouette-like against bright, hand-painted wallpapers—is frequently produced and replicated under the auspices of "Agee Manufacturing Co." (complete with stamps like those on Kohler Co. products).
[Spence, Suzy]
"Ann Agee’s Hand Warmers at Frieze,"
''Artcritical'', May 5, 2018. Retrieved February 26, 2020. The home-industry concept places Agee in the roles of worker, shop boss, owner and shopkeeper, opening a conversation touching on class, the dignity of labor and craft, feminism, capitalism and modern family life.
In 2018, she exhibited her "Handwarmers," a series of more than 200 small shoe-like and abstract forms based on ceramic Italian hand warmers, in a boutique-like display.
[Cohen, Alina]
"The 11 Best Booths at Frieze New York,"
''Artsy'', May 3, 2018. Retrieved March 5, 2020.[Abrams, Loney]
"8 Show-Stopping Artworks at Frieze for Under $10,000,"
''Artspace'', May 4, 2018. Retrieved March 5, 2020.
Wallpapers and later installations
Agee's later exhibitions and installations offer diverse displays of ceramic figurines, domestic objects and pieces of furniture, set against hand-painted and stenciled, large-scale "wallpaper drawings" on Thai mulberry paper.
[Viladas, Pilar]
"Now Showing , Ann Agee,"
''The New York Times Magazine'', November 19, 2010. Retrieved February 26, 2020.[Smith, Roberta]
''The New York Times'', July 24, 2014. Retrieved March 5, 2020. Rather than imitate expensive materials as traditional wallpaper designs do, Agee's wallpapers celebrate everyday spaces and accessible, richly patterned commercial products as objects of interest, much like the early work of Andy Warhol, Warhol or the interiors of Henri Matisse, Matisse and Roy Lichtenstein do;
they often comment pointedly on work, domestic life, gender and class, material culture, and museum display.
Agee first exhibited wallpaper drawings in her "Quotidian" show (1996), re-appropriating inexpensive fabrics and bits of household product labels that she painstakingly painted in floral-like motifs on long scrolls (e.g., ''Jello Yellow Calico'', 1995).
In their repetition and fragmentation, her wallpaper drawings suggest mass production and modernist collage, yet subvert both with what Maureen Sherlock calls their "Flatbush, Brooklyn, Flatbush funky, homegrown American Pop," hand-painted technique.
Agee's "Rules of the Pattern" (2010) and "The Kitchen Sink" (2012) exhibitions at Lock Gallery both combine brightly colored "wallpapers" depicting views of rooms in Agee's home, along with fanciful hand-crafted bowls and platters mounted on steel armatures and displays of vases, figurines and objects, suggesting sly reconstructions of her Brooklyn apartment as a site of both domesticity and production.
''Artforum'' describes the latter show as an "inquiry into the repression of the inner self and the packaging of the social self" that lays bare "unspoken fears and taboos."
In the installation ''Super Imposition'' (2010), Agee replicated stenciling and patterns from the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Georgian architecture, Georgian-style Lansdowne House, Lansdowne Room, which she then hung on the walls of its rustic, American colonial architecture, Colonial Millbach Kitchen, while displaying her vases on the room's furniture.
For "Playing House" (2012, Brooklyn Museum), she used her hand-stenciled wallpapers to similarly transform a 19th-century domestic library and parlor into an Agee Manufacturing showroom.
[Kahn, Eve]
"Museum Adds Illusion to Static Period Rooms,"
''The New York Times'', February 23, 2012. Retrieved February 26, 2020.
"Domestic Translations" (P.P.O.W., 2015) represented perhaps her most wide-ranging installation, offering vibrant interiors and abstract wallpaper drawings, porcelain penis perfume bottles doubling as necklaces, an updated, porcelain ''Lake Michigan Bathroom (III)'', abstract stoneware sculptural towers of intersecting planes cut through with cylinders and cups, and appropriations through the lens of travel.
[''The New Yorker''. "Ann Agee," April 13–20, 2015.] ''The New Yorker'' called it "a thoroughly winning but overstuffed show," adding its "excessive production has feminist overtones—think of it as a portrait of having it all."
Awards and collections
Agee has been recognized with a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, John S. Guggenheim Fellowship (2011), awards from Anonymous Was A Woman (2012), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (1997) and New York Foundation for the Arts (1997), grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1993, 1992, 1989), Wisconsin Arts Board (1992) and Empire State Craft Alliance (1990), and a Kohler Arts Center fellowship (1991–2), among others.
[National Endowment for the Arts]
"1993 Annual Report."
Retrieved February 26, 2020.
Her work belongs to the collections of the Brooklyn Museum,
LACMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art,
New-York Historical Society,
[New-York Historical Society]
"Ann Agee,"
Museum Collections. Retrieved March 1, 2020. Chazen Museum of Art,
[Chazen Museum of Art]
"Tulip Vase, Ann Agee,"
Collection. Retrieved March 1, 2020. Henry Art Gallery,
[Henry Art Gallery]
"Ann Agee,"
Collections. Retrieved March 1, 2020. Kohler Arts Center,
Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami,
[Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami]
"Ann Agee,"
Permanent Collection, Sculpture. Retrieved March 1, 2020. Museum of Sex, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts,
[Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts]
"Ann Agee,"
Collection. Retrieved March 1, 2020. and Rhode Island School of Design Museum.
[Rhode Island School of Design Museum]
"Ann Agee, Woman with Camera and Pink Skirt, 1998"
Collection. Retrieved March 1, 2020.
References
External links
Ann Agee StudioAnn Agee
Guggenheim Fellowship biography
Ann Agee
Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Artist Project
{{DEFAULTSORT:Agee, Ann
21st-century American ceramists
American women sculptors
American women installation artists
American installation artists
Artists from Philadelphia
Artists from New York City
Cooper Union alumni
Yale School of Art alumni
1959 births
Living people
21st-century American painters