When I interviewed Squeak Carnwath in 2006, she told me that painting “can take on any form.” Her desire to make “something expansive” within the legacy of painting has interested me because it rejects the notion that the medium inevitably becomes exhausted, incapable of making something, however broken it may be. It is why I went to her latest exhibition, Goddess of All, at Jane Lombard.
Carwath, whose work was the subject of an in-depth examination, Painting Is No Ordinary Object,organized by Karen Tsujimoto at the Oakland Museum of California in 2009, has long flown under the radar in New York City. Neither the Whitney Museum of American Art nor the Museum of Modern Art has anything in their collection by Carnwath, now in her late 70s.
I cannot help but wonder if this neglect is because of her belief in the legacy of oil painting dating back to the Renaissance, as well as the fact that she has never been associated with Bay Area figurative painting or the Funk movement, despite living, teaching, and exhibiting there for many years. Artists who follow their own paths are generally not held in high regard unless it fits a curator’s agenda regarding politics, hot-button topics, or the “right” kind of abstraction — which are reasons why Joanne Greenbaum, a New York-based painter who is Carnwath’s temperamental opposite, is missing from those museum collections, too. Their fierce independence has not gained them the recognition it should have long ago.
