Bay Art Files: Featuring Nina Yankowitz in "Out in View"

n the Out/Out the In, on view at the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg, is a career retrospective spanning six decades of work by Nina Yankowitz. She is often characterized as a multi-media artist: Yankowitz is a painter, she is a ceramicist, she is a sculptor; she works in fiber, in video, in installation; she composes soundscapes and operas. She has not just worked in a variety of media, she has innovated in each and brought media together in unexpected and forward-thinking ways.

Key to Yankowitz’s work and methods is her own experience of processing and representing sensory information. Yankowitz has said, “When I hear sound I see color, and when I see color I hear sound.” This experience describes the perceptual phenomenon of synesthesia, where combinations of sensory inputs are perceived together, cross-talking and creating unusual connections. The works in In the Out/Out the In engage viewers in a way that is informed by this sensory cross-pollination.

To interpret six decades of artistic output is no small feat. Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Katherine Pill organizes the exhibition into a few primary themes, though visitors will definitely find their own ley-lines and thematic veins connecting the works as they engage their own sensory imaginations. Paintings are heard with the installation of sound cones, textures can be felt by our eyes, and “voices” come through two-dimensional works through Yankowitz’s strong focus on composition and materials.

The exhibition begins with Oh Say Can You See – A Draped Sound Painting (1967-68) is an early painting directly referencing music, picturing the opening notes of the Star Spangled Banner. The draped canvas causes the staff (the lines and spaces that musical notes inhabit) to sag, wrinkle, or bunch up, suggesting distortion rather than the crisp, linear and legible representation of a musical score. The sound painting is accompanied by an audio recording by musician Phil Harmonic of a segment of the Star Spangled Banner performed on a Moog synthesizer, modulating and distorting the notes to complement the painting. This is a fitting introduction to the themes of hybridizing senses that reoccurs throughout the exhibition and Yankowitz’s career. 

The draped form of the painting participates in its interpretation. Without the structural support of a stretcher behind the canvas, every time a draped painting is installed, it is different. The dimensions and orientation are variable, the folds and shadows are different with each hanging. The artist and curator remake the work according to the space it is to inhabit and it is never the same twice.

There are a total of 11 draped, pleated or puckered paintings in the exhibition, dating between 1967 and 1972. During this period Yankowitz, like other post-minimalist artists, was experimenting with the form of paintings—do they have to be rectilinear, do they have to be supported on a frame, and if not, what can they look like?

For many of the draped paintings, the folds, swags, and ripples are achieved when Yankowitz hangs the work and tacks it to the wall with staples. The pleated and sewn paintings have a permanent structural element imposed on the canvas that can then be further manipulated when it is installed. The materials are ordinary, sometimes industrial. Paint is sprayed on with a compressor, canvas is unstretched and unsupported, meaning it can take any number of shapes.

These monumental works are remarkable individually and as a group. The acrylic spraying technique leaves much to chance—colors pool or blend and paint drips. The mechanical manipulation of the canvas itself adds another point where Yankowitz relinquishes control of the outcome. Ms. Majesty (1970-71) is a sprayed canvas that was also run through an industrial pleating machine. These combined interventions create a richly textured surface, evoking the sense of touch with its undulating planes and folds. The linear and fixed nature of the pleats, which feel architectonic in structure, creates a satisfying contrast with the swoops and arcs that are created in this particular installation of the work.

A second major grouping of works that comprise In the Out/Out the In are what Yankowitz calls scanning paintings. These works simultaneously evoke music and poetry, creating a dancing visual rhythm from which it is hard to look away.

Many of this grouping are titled Dilated Grain Reading, referring to the linen surface Yankowitz has painted on. The weave of the linen is open—or dilated—creating a visibly varied textured surface that reinforces the persistent horizontality of the markings she adds with the paint.

For viewers already familiar with these visual forms, some of the scanning paintings may resemble otherworldly musical notations. Dilated Grain Reading with Gestural Underscorings from 1975 exemplifies her systematic method of mark-making. Yankowitz mixes thick brush strokes with thin repeated horizontal structuring lines, grids, and points applied by squeezing the vinyl-based Flashe paint from a bottle. 

The markings are structured by an obvious internal rhythm and logic. In the same way that the abstracted musical notations of sheet music can create tones and music in the mind of someone who knows how to read it, this painting seems to “score” some experience, recording the rhythmic interplay of different sounds.

The other way that the word “scanning” signifies has to do with poetry. Scansion is the method of graphically representing the meter or rhythm of each syllable of each word in a poem so the reader knows how to modulate their recitation. In more common experience, it’s the way syllables of other words, with the right syllable stress pattern, can match the rhythm of a famous tag line or song. It scans.

This connotation of “scanning” was most obvious to me with the work Painting Addressing Body Parts which is paired with a sound cone playing Lips Knees Neck Elbows Chest Rear (both 1974). In contrast to Dilated Grain Reading with Gestural Underscorings which recalls the form of musical notations that could become music, the markings that comprise Painting Addressing Body Parts looks more like the waveforms familiar to anyone who has looked at a visual representation of a voice recording. Listening to the different voices, in different languages, while looking at this painting creates the sense that one is seeing the visual representation of the conversation fragments where each shade of Flashe paint is a different voice.

There is yet one more form that some of the scanning paintings reference. In Filmic Single Frame (1977-78), the marks, enclosed by square frames, escape their horizontal structure and flock together into new shapes. They no longer resemble a symbolic system like music notation, instead their visual logic suggests landscape weaving through the frames of a film, visual novel, or photographic negatives.

According to Pill, this is the first time all of the scanning paintings have been exhibited together. The variety of potential interpretations and sensory experiences within the grouping evince what a rich theme “scanning” has been for Yankowitz.

In the Out/Out the In culminates with Yankowitz’s late-career works in which she moves her experimentation into ceramics, installation, and new media.

In the 1980s, Yankowitz worked to bring the puffy-firm texture she achieved with Flashe paint to ceramics. Hell’s Breath – A Vision of the Sounds of Falling (1982) is one of the results of these innovations in the medium. Note the evocation of three senses in the work’s title—vision, sound, and proprioception (falling). Hell’s Breath carves out a space for looking. The myriad detailed ceramic tiles molded in the shapes of faces and masks invite close examination. The faces seem to look back creating reciprocal regard between the viewer and the artwork.

The video installation Unsung (S)hero: Emmy Noether Tempts Fate from Then to Now (2022) introduces viewers to the mathematician whose career in Germany was cut short by Nazi purges of the intellectual class. She escaped to America and taught for two years at Bryn Mawr before her death at the young age of 53. The video monitors appear to be arched windows—the illusion complete with the suggestion of vertical window blinds—through which viewers see the cosmos. Noether’s work is relevant to contemporary development of theoretical physics.

The exhibition also includes items from Yankowitz’s archive like sketchbooks, artist’s books, the libretto of her opera Personae Mimickings (the audio accompanies Dilated Grain Reading: Scanning Reds and Blues (1973) in the main gallery) as well as works in the permanent collection galleries that continue her experiments in new media. As much as I’ve written about In the Out/Out the In here, this is a fraction of the works on view; there is much for visitors to encounter.

In closing, I’d like to revisit the draped paintings. The two primary creative techniques Yankowitz deployed in these paintings—draping and paint spraying—can be compared to two of her contemporaries. Jules Olitski used acrylic spray beginning in 1965 (on stretched canvas), and Sam Gilliam began creating draped paintings (with a different painting technique) in 1967-68. Both of these artists first exhibited these works in 1969. Yankowitz’s Draped Paintings were exhibited in 1968 and Pleated Paintings in 1969.

Yankowitz’s 1971 solo exhibition Draped and Pleated Paintings at the Kornblee Gallery in New York was reviewed by art critic James R. Mellow of the New York Times and the work was disparaged. Mellow called a 9-foot pleated canvas “a painting en deshabille” (in a seductive state of undress or scantily clad); another work is compared to an elegant but dusty curtain from an abandoned house.

The necessity of this exhibition and celebration of Yankowitz is clear from the variance in critical reception between these artists. Olitski’s spray paintings were called momentous by Michael Fried; Clement Greenberg believed he was the greatest painter alive. Washington critics declared Gilliam’s exhibition at the Corcoran “an enormously important show,” and “one of those watermarks by which the Washington art community measures its evolution.”

The purpose of this comparison is not to imply or suggest paths of influence among the artists, rather it is to demonstrate how Yankowitz’s work was feminized and belittled relative to that of her male peers. One wonders how Mellow would have reviewed works by Olitski and Gilliam, especially if all identifying information about their makers were obscured.

Draped Impotent Squares (1969) is hard to read as anything other than a critique of hard-edge abstraction, minimalist geometric sculpture, and even of critics like Greenberg and Fried by whose approval careers and legacies were cemented. These are not the rigid squares one expects. They have been softened by the draped canvas, collapsing in on themselves as if rotting from the center.

Decorative Minimalism Cube (1991) is a second shot at the imposed rules of minimalism. Decoration was anathema in minimalist and post-minimalist art—a formal imposition that has discriminatory roots since “decorative art” became synonymous with femininity, craft, and the applied arts. This division is no longer taken as a given as scholars and curators recover the history of women artists. 

Critical celebration of Yankowitz is long overdue. Expanding the art historical canon to include women and people of color that may have been excluded by their contemporary curators and critics is an ongoing struggle. In particular it is important that Yankowitz’s name be included in the roster of (mostly male, mostly white) post-minimalist artists. Art movements are never a monolith, and they are never solely the realm of white men, even if that is how it often seems.