When I first met Judy Glantzman in the 1990s, I remember how her daughter — a toddler at the time — would be at her side in the studio or the gallery. The fluidity between home, motherhood, the studio, and gallery business — and the physical attachment between mother and daughter — made an impression on me. It wasn’t that she shifted quickly between roles as much as she didn’t feel the need to: she occupied those places simultaneously.
In the fall of 2016, we were both teaching at Purchase College, and we carpooled, along with fellow artist Susanna Heller. During those drives, we weathered the political rollercoaster surrounding Election Day by talking non-stop about everything from our teaching experiences, to our personal lives (Glantzman was caretaking her elderly mother at the time) to planning political responses, which, in addition to protests, included an exhibition I was curating of explicit feminist art. Glantzman’s and Heller’s work was included in the show, and they also helped me to conceptualize the project. Glantzman decided that her contribution to the show would be a copy of Courbet’s “Origin of the World,” and within a week or so she brought me the small painting swathed in bubble wrap — she had taken care of everything, from concept to execution, including the delivery.
For me, those experiences capture something of Glantzman’s spirit: she gets things done, and she’s not precious about how she goes about it, leaping with a comfortable agility between the personal and the professional, home life and art life. For the last several years, her studio has been in her home in SoHo; she works at her dining table and on the couch, even in front of the television.
Glantzman’s work has a pulsating energy that is in harmony with the way she navigates the world: rapidly, generously, in motion and in conversation. In her paintings of the 1990s, she positioned figures with outsized heads centrally on the canvas, their aura and painterly fields extending outward. In more recent works on paper, the whole sheet is often covered and layered with forms and lines; emblematic objects shift from place to place, cut and re-collaged, turning their fields into universes where disparate entities can pass through and co-exist. Her paintings and her sculptural objects feel emergent and raw, suggesting unadulterated desire, yearning, and grief.
Glantzman graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1978. She began exhibiting in the early 1980s in the East Village art scene, at Civilian Warfare and Gracie Mansion. She followed these shows with exhibitions at Blum Helman and Hirschl & Adler Modern in the 1990s and at Betty Cuningham Gallery, where she has shown for the past 15 years. She had a 30-year retrospective at Dactyl Foundation, New York, in spring 2009, and a solo exhibition at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, in 2018.
The starting point for this interview was a public conversation with the artist at Betty Cuningham Gallery on the occasion of her exhibition 1979-Today in January 2019.
To read the interview with Judy Glantzman, click the link below.