BIO AND PUBLICATIONS

SHIRLEY PETTIBONE

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Shirley Pettibone was born Shirley Young in Bakersfield, CA, in 1936, to a farming community that was bewildered by her ambition to become an artist. Following her parents’ plea to pursue a practical career, she obtained a teaching degree from Principia College in 1957. Once completed, she applied and entered The Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1958 to pursue her true vocation. This is where she met her soon-to-be husband, Richard Pettibone. The pair forged a companionship that is both apparent in their sharing of a studio and an apartment, but also in their fearless and joint interest in the most forward artistic trends. It is rumored that a show of Joseph Cornell at The Pasadena Art Museum in 1960 may be responsible for an outpouring of neo-Dada works in the LA area at the time, a period now often referred to as “Assemblage,” or “Junk Art.” The institute was run at the time by students of Peter Voulkos, and ceramics was an important part of the curriculum. Both Shirley and Richard tried their hands at ceramics, and Shirley began experimenting with cloth that she stuffed with pillow fiber. She created a piece “Untitled (Cloth Assemblage),” circa 1963, that resembles a womb and a fetus.

The work made two years earlier than Eva Hesse’s first series of conceptual sculptures is highly innovative in its unabashedly feminine openness. In a statement written in later years, she wrote: “I began creating original work around 1961. At the time, I felt it was impossible to do flat paintings anymore. Real objects reflected substance, but I was adding magic by painting them with additional imagery. An early series of collaged drawings with paint included parts of photographs of nude women. I regard these as a poetic, enigmatic celebration of Woman as a personal statement. At this time, I also began exploring the possibilities of using polyester resin as a stiffening agent for cloth in my three-dimensional paintings to convey strength. I did a series of rumpled images with ambiguous content, including flower and body parts. These pieces were both a celebration of the feminine and a protest against the conformity of the constrictive 1950s.”

FIRST SOLO EXHIBITIONS (1962-1966)
Her partnership with Richard led to a dual exhibition at Cunningham Gallery in January 1962 where they presented ceramics and paintings. She obtained her first solo show in the Spring of 1963 at Aura Gallery in Pasadena. For this occasion, Shirley Pettibone presented a highly audacious series of wall sculptures made from recycled handbags and women’s negligees. The feminine articles are transformed by the artist with rough materials in what seems to be organs (rib cages, vaginas, skin…). These works are reviewed in Artforum: “Three-dimensional organic forms fashioned from plastic and a variety of materials dominate the exhibition (…) The references to reproductive organs are, in some instances, nevertheless, too direct.” (Artforum, Spring 1963, review signed C.P.) It is to be noted that the review carefully avoids discussing the feminist position of the works, but the reviewer seems more impressed by her drawings that: “…painfully probe the unconscious mind while titillating the conscious.”

The reference to reproduction and particularly the bodies of women now seem, in retrospect highly relevant to an artist who engaged in work that directly confronted the fate of women in America in the early ‘60s.

After graduating from Otis, both she and Richard established their studio in Los Angeles and began experimenting with silk-screen printing as early as 1964. An exhibition at the California State College at Los Angeles showcased her screenprinted works in 1966. The work was composed of multi-paneled paintings show- casing images of clouds and water. While the works garnered some attention, it is Richard’s miniature renditions of Warhol, Jasper Johns, and others, all sized scrupulously after advertisements in Artforum, that truly took off with an exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in 1965 and culminated with his solo show at Castelli Gallery in NY in 1968. The couple moved to NY following the show at Castelli gallery to start a new home and studio in Brooklyn. It is there as early as 1968 that Shirley Pettibone renews with making work of her own.

THE CLOTH OBJECTS (1968-1973)
The resulting paintings are sometimes sewn and turned onto themselves to form tubes that she fills with pillow stuffing. She may have referred to these objects as “Stained Batting” on archival photographs or later in a show of these works in LA as “Cloth Objects.” The pieces are both revolutionary and highly synthetic in their approach to painting and sculpture. Neither truly one nor the other, they articulate, with a high degree of clarity, the elements of the crafts, decompose them, and reorganize them in an object that feels highly familiar and yet definitely foreign.

The years between 1968 and 1973 seemed particularly important and prevalent in the making of works for both women artists worldwide and for Shirley Pettibone, who saw the political revolution taking place as an opportunity to make her most refined and mature work to date. The Cloth Objects were presented in three major venues in the course of three years: Ivan Karp’s first gallery “100 Acres,” in New York, Lucy Lippard’s seminal exhibition at the Aldrich “26 Contemporary Women Artists,” and a smaller yet notable presentation of the works at a newly opened artist space in Los Angeles, Orlando Gallery, in 1973. The works (of which documentation exists for at least 40 pieces) can be divided into five categories: paintings, which are stained muslin freely hung on the wall without stretchers; single-strand batts; multi-stranded batts; multi-stranded batts that are hung in a rainbow pattern, and single strands wrapped in a collar pattern. The exhibitions seemed to function as a repertory or index of the type of opportunities this invention provided. The stuffed objects project a highly charged charisma that is both structurally primitive, ironically psychoanalytical, and, in the sense of a “Soft Sculpture,” inviting and sensuous.

During this period, the Cloth Objects could also take the form of a piece of fabric cut into one-inch strips that were then sewn back together, repaired to some extent. These pieces evoked flags and provide insight into the role that sewing may play in these works as a traditionally feminine craft whose function is to bring broken pieces together (quilting).

LUCY LIPPARD (26 Contemporary Women Artists)
In 1971 these works were included in the seminal exhibition curated by Lucy Lippard titled “26 Contemporary Women Artists” at the Aldrich museum. In 1969, Lucy Lippard, by her own admission, was “alarmed” at the state of inclusion of women in art exhibitions. She decided to tour studios in the tristate area with the ambition of showcasing the works of women artists: “I took on this show because I knew there were so many women whose work was as good or better than that currently being shown, but who, because of the prevailing discriminatory policies of most galleries and museums, can rarely get anyone to visit their studios or take them as seriously as their male counterparts.” Over the course of several years, Lippard selected 26 women artists for her show including Shirley Pettibone.

Shirley Pettibone, Survey exhibition, Duane Thomas Gallery, exhibition view, 2023

In the years following these groundbreaking innovations, Pettibone shifted her interest to realist painting. It may be that the deconstruction project which took much of her practice in the 1960s had found an ultimate expression and was over. One such “flag piece” presented in our exhibition is composed of 51 strands of stained fabric, with twenty lines of sewing running across, bringing the piece together as one.

PHOTO REALISM (1973-2011).
As soon as 1973, Pettibone became interested in Photorealism and began a series of works until her death that dealt with imagery imbued with a sense of loss and wonder. Like many, she made a shift from the conceptual art scene of the 60s to become a naturalist. Observant of trees, clouds, and bodies of water, she painstakingly depicted them with rigorous strokes. In an artist statement she wrote for an exhibition catalogue of these works: “I am a realist, but some of the symbolism of my early work still lies beneath the surface. I have never liked obvious statements but have chosen ambiguous symbolism and suggestion in order to give the viewer choices. My love and concern for nature and the environment are important elements in my art, and I hope my work conveys a life-affirming spirit to others.

BIO

Born Bakersfield, CA 1936. Died in Los Angeles, CA 2011. Principia College, Elsah, Illinois, BA 1957. Otis Institute, Los Angeles, MFA 1962.

SELECTED ONE WOMAN EXHIBITIONS (1963-2023)

2023 Art Basel Miami, Survey section, with Duane Thomas Gallery, NY

2022 Duane Thomas Gallery, NY

2002 George Stern Fine Arts, West Hollywood, CA

2001 Galleria Beretich, Claremont, CA

Village Square Gallery, Montrose, CA

1997 Galleria Beretich, Claremont, CA

1994 Galleria Beretich, Claremont, CA

1991 Tortue Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

1990 Tortue Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

1988 Tortue Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

1986 Modernism, San Francisco, CA

1986 Tortue Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

1983 Tortue Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

1981 Tortue Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

1980 Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall, Los Angeles, CA

1979 Tortue Gallery, Santa Monica, CAAlbert Contreras Gallery, LA

1978 Albert Contreras Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

1976 Hundred Acres Gallery, New York

1973 Hundred Acres Gallery, New York

1963 Aura Gallery, Pasadena, California

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS (1966-2000)

2000 Shirley Pettibone/Karen Neubert, Cal Poly Downtown Center, Pomona, CA

A Lasting Legacy, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA

1997 West Coast Painting and Sculpture, Oceanside Museum, Oceanside, CA

1996 Maiden California, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA

1994 Too Cool, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA

1989 Watercolor, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA

Currents on Realism, Uddoh Gallery, New York, NY

1987 Ten Contemporary Watercolor Painters, Lang Art Gallery, Claremont, CA

1985 New Romantic Landscape, Works Gallery, Long Beach, CA

1984 California Drawings, Modernism, San Francisco, CA

1982 The Real Thing, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna, CA

1981 Coastal Currents, California/New York, CCSU, Corpus Christi, TX

1980 Photo-Realist Painting in California, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA

1977 41st Midyear, Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio

1977 Miniature, California State University at Los Angeles

1977 Realism, Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida

1976 Attitudes, California State University at Los Angeles

1976 Five Realists, Mount St.Mary’s college, Los Angeles

1975 UC Irvine 1965-1975, La Jola Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jola, California

1975 Watercolors and Drawings, Meisel Gallery, New York

1975 Sky Show, Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles

1975 Sense of Reference: Explorations in Contemporary Realism, University of California at San Diego

1974 Selections in Contemporary Realism, Akron Art Institute, Ohio

1974 Painting: Color, Form, and Surface, Scripps College, Claremont California

1973 East Coast / West Coast / New Realism, California State University at San Jose

1973 New American Landscapes, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

1972 Three Women Artists, Hundred Acres Gallery, New York

1971 26 Contemporary Women Artists, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefiled, Connecticut

1967 Ten LA Artists, Los Angeles Valley College, Van Nuys, California

1966 Four, California State University at Los Angeles