Alice Mackler: Sculpture, Painting, Drawing (2021)
Hardcover, 184 pages, 8 x 0.8 x 11.4 inches
Written by Matthew Higgs and Kelly Taxter, interview with Joanne Greenbaum
"Mackler considers herself a painter, but has lately focused on built ceramic sculpture. She crafts and paints her clay figures in a style that hovers between faux naïve and folk. While the octogenarian has only recently gained recognition, she began making art as a teenager, while attending Buxton School in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Throughout the the remainder of the 1950's, Mackler studied drawing and painting in her hometown of New York City, attending the Art Students League, Art Life Studio, and the School of Visual Arts. During these formative years, she witnessed the center of the art world shift from Paris to New York, and with that migration, the births of American Modernism, Pop, and Minimalism–all dominated by men. She was present for the sociopolitical upheavals of the 1960s and the rise of the feminist movement during the 1970s. While she held a full-time job, she returned to school to complete her BFA in 1988, and saw the reappearance of (mostly male) Expressionist painting, and the emergence of Postmodernism, which continues to revise and redefine histories and canons. Her sustained and striking study of women's bodies both echoes and rebukes these consequential turning points. It also elicits surprising connections between her particular forms and the long history of how women have been depicted in and have worked with clay."
-Kelly Taxter (from the introduction)
