News / Archive
“The Leaner Series: Pryad,” 1974 on view in Bushwick, BK Exhibition
My “Leaner Series” from the 1970s is rediscovered and on view:
+ M.David & Co. | 56 Bogart Street #114, Brooklyn
+ Opening Reception: Apr 14, 6-9 PM
“Causality”: an exhibition curated by Jason Andrew
Featuring works by Paula Barr, Sarah Bednarek, Ali Della Bitta, Daniel John Gadd, Brece Honeycutt, Ellen Letcher, Trevor King, Elizabeth Murray, Judy Pfaff, Wade Schaming, Christopher Vazquez, and Greg Wall
During the 1970s, Paula Barr (b. 1945, Philadelphia, PA) sought a more engaging experience beyond the rigid, static canvas hanging on a wall. Working in a former sewing factory on Berry Street in Williamsburg, with her neighbor Martin Puryear downstairs, Barr began to lean her stretched canvas panels against the wall and then stack another on top. “The Leaner Series: Pyrad,” 1974, was among the first work to be realized and was instantly recognized and exhibited by #KlausKertess at #BykertGallery. As with each canvas in this series, Barr sought to traverse the large area of the canvas with paint in one commanding and empowering brush stroke. In 1985, with the birth of her son, Barr broadened her palette to include photography and alternative media. She was an early practitioner of #Cibachrome. She became an innovator in creating site-specific public art installations that melded photography and glass tiles. Her subsequent exploration of architecture, particularly the panoramic views of bridges and skyscrapers of Manhattan, resulted in Barr creating some of the most iconic photographs of New York. Barr studied painting at @bostonu graduating with honors in 1967.
Image: “The Leaner Series: Pyrad,” 1974, acrylic, dyes, mixed media on canvas (two panels), 87 x 64 x 24 in (221 x 162.6 x 61 cm) overall
News: Postcards from the Edge
Paula Barr is participating in this great cause!
Postcards from the Edge:
a benefit for Visual AIDS.
Postcards from the Edge is an exhibition and benefit sale of original 4x6" artworks in all artistic media by established and emerging artists. This year, for the first time, the event will be both online and in person, with sales ONLY online. For more information on how this will work, click here. All the artwork is exhibited anonymously, and the name of the artist is revealed only after the work is purchased. All proceeds support the program of Visual AIDS.
News: PBNY Merchandise Available
The beautiful photography of the New York City landmark, Grand Central Terminal, graces silk scarves — a monochromatic sky scene of star constellations from the ceiling of Grand Central Station. Or choose a poster commemorating the station, a little bit of historic NYC as seen through the lens of Paula Barr.
Model: Leaura Luciano, Photo: Hector Caminero
Paula Barr work in “Seeing RED” for Art-Fluent.com
Barr’s photograph, “Chinese Gas Station,” has been selected to be part of Art-Fluent's online exhibit “Seeing RED.”
Behold the power of red. After black and white, red is the first color that humans perceive. It’s the color babies see before any other and the first that those suffering from a brain injury start seeing again. One of the boldest colors in the spectrum, red stands out in artwork and grabs our attention more than any other color can.
Red, the color of our blood, vitality, and life force, it vastly communicates love, lust, heat, anger, majesty, passion, and power. And all at the same time warning us of danger, fear, rage, and aggression. All those red flags.Art-Fluent.com
From the Archive (March 18, 1973): Is there sex discrimination in art?
The Journal News, March 18, 1973
Is there sex discrimination in art?
By John Dalmas (Staff Writer)
If women artists are being discriminated against because of their sex, many do not like to admit it openly. In fact, it even may be a taboo subject among some who feel they have achieved status in the profession.
Studies have shown that groups feeling themselves the target of dscrimination – women among them – nevertheless tend to accept the attitude of the dominant majority, and it appears it may be quietly the same in the art world. In a field where standards are nebulous and what is “good” is determined by the imposition of personal taste, perhaps such behavior is inevitable, whoever may dominate it.
But whether women want to admit it or not, they are dependent largely upon male gallery operators, museum curators, educators, and critics for any kind of initial (and sometimes continuing) recognition. Generally approaching the art marketplace with an oblique, “que sera, sera” push, quite a few women will actually consider themselves lucky – even grateful for what crumbs are thrown them by the men who control the business.
A good index of how things stand with women artists may be found in an examination of the current annual (now to be a biennial) exhibition of contemporary American art at New York Citys’ Whitney Museum which opened last month and closes today. While this exhibition seems to lack any real thrust as its stated aim of “selecting works contributing significantly to the development of contemporary art” would lead one to anticipate, it does show the work of many younger innovators – at least those who have managed to get the attention of the museum’s curators.
Though up from previous years, the number of women artists represented in the show is still small – less than one out of four. Given the number of younger artists represented in the show and the number of young women seriously into art these days, the disparity at the Whitney would seem to make the question of discrimination a fair one to ask, and I talked about it with five young women artists who have works in the show.
“It’s so complex,” posed Joanna Pousette-Dart, 25, of Suffern, who maintains a studio near the Fulton Fish Market in New York City. “It’s so hard for people to know. A collector buys in this country because it is an investment, and the person who has told him what to buy is usually a gallery person – and a man, to be sure. But it goes beyond that.”
Ms. Pousette-Dart, who is the only woman artist from Rockland to make the Whitney show, teaches painting at Ramapo College in Mahwah, N.J., where she was hired first on a part-time basis last year. Her entry in the show, entitled, “Anashuya” (after a poem by Yeats, she says), is an execution of sand mixed with acrylic painted on a three-dimensional canvas construction.
“I’ve always hated to compete,” she continued. “Even as a child. I hated games for that reason. The people that do best in getting their paintings in galleries are aggressive and competitive; I’m not that way. I don’t think that there is any male art or female art. I just think there is good and bad. I certainly think that women are going to bring insight into what they do, but I don’t think there is any separate esthetic.
“It’s very hard to pinpoint the fact that discrimination against women has been very obvious. There was a time when some women artists would use men’s first names or names that sounded masculine, like Lee Krasner, but we’ve gotten to the point now, I think, when a gallery person doesn’t look at the fact that you are a woman. Hopefully it will equal out in time. It’s not something that has tremendously upset me – in my own career,” she remarked.
Barbara Kruger, 28, who grew up in a poor neighborhood of Newark, N.J., and now lives in the city below SoHo, feels that discrimination exists in the profession but blames it on more than male domination.
“The art scene is about money,” she said. “Men usually control money. It’s a speculative business, too, and speculation doesn’t necessarily have to do with good art. The whole business of discrimination has to do with the non-humanism broken into the fabric of our society. Women get it, blacks get it. There are so many women controlled by men in this country that it’s hard to be clear about the issue of sexism.”
A graduate of Syracuse University, Ms. Kruger went on from there to Parsons but dropped out about halfway through.
“I was bored,” she shrugged. “School is bogus. What it does is give women artists, once they’re out, a chance to make money by teaching, but I really don’t think that it’s terribly important.”
Ms. Kruger’s work in the show, a large, circular (54-inch in diameter) mixed media construction entitled “2 A.M. Cookie (Big)”, teases the imagination into believing in cushioned rose windows from Byzantium.
“There is discrimination against women, but I can’t pinpoint it,” she went on. “Any validation I’ve gotten about art here in New York is from women. Men artists don’t take women seriously. But it’s changing. I think it’s changing. I think both men and women are victims of a deadening in our society. It will be two or three generations before there is really a change.”
One woman artists among the five I talked to, Joan Snyder, 32, has reached a greater measure of success than the others but at the same time is not too happy about it.
“I’m a special case,” Ms. Snyder said. “I completely support the movement, (women’s liberation) but the only kind of discrimination I feel now is of a positive type. People are almost using me because I am a woman. They need a token woman artist – a strong artist. I know my work is good, but I also know it’s selling because I am a woman. For most women, I don't think it’s the situation.”
Selling as many paintings as she can paint, Ms. Snyder, who lives in the city, but is originally from New Brunswick, N.J., feels she is painting just to sell.
“I’m convinced that the museums and the galleries destroy the artist today. They sort of eat you up alive before you can grow and mature. I refuse to be killed by them,” she rapped out with abandon. “I’m planning to take some and go off and think about where I’m headed.”
Holding an MFA from Rutgers, Ms. Snyder has done some teaching and feels that discrimination definitely exists in the schools, commenting that some art departments are still not hiring women. Currently working in an au courant abstract style, her entry in the show is a large nine by six mixed media painting entitled, “Womanchild.”
Arlene Slavin, 30, a native New Yorker with an MFA from Pratt, commented that the Whitney show has been a playday for critics, many of whom regard the annual exhibition as a “women’s” show anyway.
“I personally haven’t had much experience with discrimination,” Ms. Slavin commented, “mainly because I haven’t tried to get my work out. I felt because I was a woman I had to be really good. I wanted it to really be terrific before I tried. I sort of thought I didn’t want to be too vulnerable.”
Ms. Slavin, like several of the other women, feels that a special area of discrimination against women exists in the teaching profession.
“In six years of art school, I never had a successful woman teacher to model myself after,” she regretted. “Some art departments are run with a lot of part-time people. In those cases they will hire women – I was teaching part-time myself at Hofstra last year – but in cases where the departments are solidly established, they are usually run by men.”
Working with acrylic on canvas, Ms. Slavin takes at least a month to do a painting, doing a lot of preparatory drawings, then working very slowly, using a lot of overlap and very thin amounts of paint. Her painting in the Whitney is an illusory pattern of geomatics entitled “Saba-Almas.”
According to Pennsylvania-born Paula Barr, 27, who lives in her own SoHo studio, the situation of women in art is very ambiguous.
“I don’t really subscribe to the women’s liberation movement because I don’t feel I have been discriminated against as a woman,” she remarked.
Working with five women artists recently in an attempt to understand the problems of being a woman, Ms. Barr found that all the women in the group had no problems as far as their art was concerned.
“The real problem was pulling their regular lives together,” she disclosed. “A woman would go out to work to help support her family, but it’s always the woman alone who has to support her own art. She doesn’t get any help. It’s because a woman isn’t taken seriously. It’s just accepted that the man comes first.”
Commenting on the background of today’s artist, Ms. Barr feels that unlike popular notions, all of them are very middle-class.
“If they don’t have an MFA, they have at least a BA. It’s where the artist now fits into society. In fact, most artists today actually come from a higher middle-class background. It is only after they become successful that they become classless.”
Ms. Barr, who has a BFA from Boston University, has been able to support herself by selling her paintings. Studying Chinese calligraphy in some detail, she has developed a “whole new language” in her work, she says, painting doorway-like canvases (one, “Moss Toss,” is in the Whitney) that seem to bring into the room a view of white skies touched with falling leaves and waving strands of weeping willow.
“It has to do with the Western brush with an attitude toward the Eastern brush,” she explained.
Shunning all-women’s art shows as well as women’s liberation, Ms. Barr declined to align herself with a recent women’s show in New York called “Women Choose Women.”
“When you do that, you have lent yourself to a sexist arrangement,” she said. “Women artists are doing well without that.”
From the Archive (Sept 3, 1994): This is BIG: Barr captures Mobile’s panorama in world’s largest photo
By Kathy Jumper, Living Editor
Perched on the edge of the pilot house, six flights above the ship's main deck, Paula Barr had Mobile's waterfront at her feet. She snapped the picture and prayed the sun wouldn't set. A sweaty 45 minutes later her 360 degree panoramic camera stopped. Her heart leapt. The photo she had chased two years was hers. "It had to be art," she said. "It had to be magical and sing. I did not want just another documentation."
In January, her work of art, ''Twilight Interlude," will debut at the Mobile Infirmary Medical Center's new atrium. It's the world's largest photograph, measuring 12 feet high and 72 feet long. The photo will be produced on glass tiles and spans an entire wall at the Infirmary's atrium waiting area. The atrium is the final phase of an expansion project which joins all of the hospital's outpatient services. It will serve as a waiting area for patients and family and includes a Food Court For the Infirmary, the mural is viewed as a gift to the public. Chandler Bramlett, CEO of Infirmary Health System, has worked with Ms. Barr from the start. She pitched the idea of a photo and he offered a bigger challenge--the mural. He's pleased with the results. "It's our sincere desire that the mural provide an environment that promotes healing and has a positive impact on everyone that passes through the atrium," he said.
For Ms. Barr, who was raised in Mobile and lives in New York, the photograph is a gift in honor of her daughter Lauren, who died a couple of months after birth from heart problems. It's for Lauren, who died a decade ago, and other people who have lost "angels" that she brought her art to a hometown hospital, she said. After spending endless hours, days and weeks in sterile hospital waiting rooms worrying about her daughter, she relived those days when her late father, Milton Briskman, was hospitalized at the Infirmary a couple of years ago. "I had spent three days with my head in an ashtray while sitting in the waiting room at the Infirmary," she recalled. That's when the photo idea came to mind. "With this panoramic photo mural I envisioned something so majestic and serene that the viewer could spend those horrific and unending hours exploring its detail and literally losing themselves in it."
The scope of the project was as awesome as the huge wall the mural will cover. For months she hopped aboard tugboats, studied weather maps, traipsed the rooftops of skyscrapers, and dangled from monster cranes on Mobile River. She photographed 11 locations around the city, and admits, "they almost lost me," on her first shoot -- a 105-degree, breezeless August afternoon at Bellingrath Gardens. Indeed, it was the tranquil Bellingrath photo (even Callaway Gardens sent butterflies to release for the shoot) that was a close runner, up to the waterfront photo. But Bramlett argued for the port.
"He wanted the heart and pulse of the city and wanted progress to be the message of the city," she said. "So it was back to the drawing board." While preparing to board another of Chipco's cranes last October, she stumbled upon the Yucatan, a French-owned vessel bound for Europe that had docked at Berth 2 at the Alabama State Docks. "It was 3 p.m, and like a mirage," Ms. Barr said, relishing in the ship's size and perfect view. She tracked down the ship's broker to get permission to go aboard. Ironically, when she went back the next day to take more pictures, the ship had left the port. "Had it really been there?" she asked, laughing. "It really was like a mirage."
And before she had a chance to see the waterfront photos, the lab she had rushed her film to in New York, was calling her with rave reviews. "Awesome," is what her colleagues dubbed the shots. High praise for an established painter who didn't take her first photograph until the late '70s during a visit to Mobile. She and her husband, Jack Krueger, a sculptor, were driving to Dauphin Island and she stopped to take a photo of the red dirt--the result was a brilliant red image that she still cherishes. Like her paintings, the photos she takes express action and are large, almost life-size. "I've always wanted my photographs to have the same experience as a painting. And I've always wanted to get movement in a still photograph."
Her paintings have been exhibited at renowned museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has worked with corporate clients for 15 years. Including Minolta, M&M Mars, New York Times Magazine, Chase Manhattan Bank, Bellevue Hospital, New York Life Insurance and New York Telephone. Her next-assignment is for another regular client, Life Magazine. She has also released numerous award-winning posters including prints of the Brooklyn Bridge and George Washington Bridge. The Infirmary project has earned the distinction of being listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest photograph in the world. The hospital will do the project justice by making a documentary on it, as well as produce a commemorative poster and book In January.
While Ms. Barr and her husband reside In New York with their nine-year-old son, August, it's Mobile she calls home. "Every time I come to Mobile and step off the plane, I feel at peace, I feel like I've come home."
“For months she hopped aboard tugboats, studied weather maps, traipsed the rooftops of skyscrapers, and dangled from monster cranes on Mobile River. She photographed 11 locations around the city, and admits, ‘they almost lost me,’ on her first shoot -- a 105-degree, breezeless August afternoon at Bellingrath Gardens.”
From the Archive (Feb 21, 1988): New York photographer can thank her Mobile roots
Published on the occasion of Paula Barr’s return to Mobile, AL, this feature article original appeared in the Mobile Press Register on Sunday, February 21, 1988. The article traces Barr on assignment in Port City photographing the original Mardi Gras in a joint project for Ken Hansen Photographic, Fuji and the Globus Brothers.
By MARY LEE CONWELL
Press Register Reporter
Paula Barr can thank her Southern roots for her New York photographic career.
Ms. Barr shot her first photograph in Mobile more than a decade ago of a red dirt road near Theodore Industrial Park. The photo, appropriately called "Red Dirt Road," launched what has become a highly successful career in a highly competitive medium—panoramic photography.
Ms. Barr spoke about her career earlier this week during a photo assignment in Mobile. She spent five days in the Port City photographing the original Mardi Gras in a joint project for Ken Hansen Photographic, Fuji and the Globus Brothers.
The project arose out of Hansen's need for a panoramic photo display. Knowing Ms. Barr’s top reputation for panoramic photography, he asked her to submit images of her previous work. Ms. Barr won the assignment and convinced Hansen that Mardi Gras would be the perfect subject for his display.
She used three different cameras to get the panoramic effects of the parades, the docks, the balls and the masses of merrymakers. She used Fuji Neopan ISO 400 film in the Fuji Panoramic 617 which photographs 105 degrees around, the Fuji six by nine, which photographs 90 degrees and the GlobuScope which photographs a complete 360 degree circumference.
"This was the perfect environment for the GlobuScope," Ms. Barr said. "It's a very special visual event for me," she said about Mobile Mardi Gras, speaking not only of colorful pageantry but of her upbringing here. The Philadelphia native grew up in Mobile and was graduated from Davidson High School. Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Milton Briskman, and two brothers, Donald and Arthur Briskman, still live here.
Ms. Barr left Mobile to make her way in New York as a painter of “color field paintings,” she said. "I was educated as a painter."
From 1967 through 1977 she spent eight to nine hours a day in her studio painting large canvases. That career lasted until 1977 when she and her husband Jack Krueger moved back to Mobile.
When Ms. Barr returned to Mobile, she decided she could not paint here. “I couldn't paint here because it was better for photographs," she said, explaining she views painting as a medium in which the artist’s interpretation of her subject can improve the understanding of or give new depth to that subject. Ms. Barr felt the scale and proportion, vibrant colors and the light and shadows provided by the space and bright sun in Mobile needed no interpretation by a painter's brush.
“There seems to be a literalness about information here,” Ms. Barr said. “Things are naturally composed here."
The same time, “I was introduced to a new photo print process which used vivid color dyes that offered a range and effect similar to a painter's palette—Ilford Cibachrome,” Ms. Barr said in a 1986 article in the Professional Photographer magazine.
Paula Barr, “Red Dirt Alabama,” 1977
With these discoveries, she photographed “Red Dirt Road.” The painter-turned-photographer wanted her new craft to have the same impact as her large paintings had. She tried her first grand photo endeavor of a door at her home at 700 Government Street. “Veranda Door” is the size of an old Victorian window, 40 by 60 inches, and still hangs in her husband's office.
The work that Ms. Barr may not have discovered had she not moved back to Mobile is the very thing that gave her the ambition to move back to New York. Although her husband wanted to stay in Mobile (and is ready to move back here anytime, she said), Ms. Barr realized her photographic career needed the type market found only in New York.
Ms. Barr is now one of New York's photographers known for the detail and depth apparent in all her photos. "I don't manipulate the image," she said. “I have to work clean and direct.” Her work is exhibited in such places as Bellevue Hospital, Goldwater Hospital and Pennsylvania Station.
The Pennsylvania Station project was “a real challenge to create,” Ms. Barr said. The mural she created there is 2 ½ feet height by 52 feet long and is viewed by 250,000 people every day. She said she photographed panoramas in the four directions from atop One Pennsylvania Plaza and pieced North, South, East and West directions together in the 52 foot mural.
"It was an odd assignment," she said.
At Bellevue Hospital she had to find images for two eight by 18 foot murals which would draw patients out of their rooms to speed their recovery process. After a hospital psychologist completed a study of the patients’ needs, Ms. Barr photographed "Brooklyn Bridge at Dusk" and "Queensboro at Night" which are exhibited in the hospital's day room.
She is now producing a mural for the New York Port Authority’s Bus Terminal in the heart of the Times Square area. Ms. Barr is also working on a desk calendar which will feature all the bridges in New York City.
“I love the production of photography,” Ms; Barr said. Her work involves a good deal of pre-production work often times with several assistants and a team of clients.
“It’s all about teamwork,” she said, “When I'm working with someone, I'm constantly asking client what results he wants."
Ms. Barr is expanding her photographic/business talents to a new business called Large Format. She explained the new photo stock agency will provide exclusively panoramic photographs.
She will send a videocassette catalog full of panoramic photographs to interested clients. After viewing what is available, the client may order a photo (for a fee) to use in whatever project he may be putting together.
The agency will not consist solely of her photos, Ms. Barr said, but will give other panoramic photographers an avenue by which to sell their work.
As far as her recent visit to Mobile goes, she said the Mardi Gras panoramas will be viewed immediately as murals in New York City and she is working to get them featured in a national magazine.