Hales Gallery is delighted to announce a solo exhibition by Andrea Geyer, Collective Weave. The exhibition is being held at Handwerker Gallery and explores an entry into American Modernism through the women who drove and enabled it by creating institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Société Anonyme. These women also maintained Modernism’s creative vibrancy by contributing and editing magazines, organizing salons, and offering financial support when needed. They connected through their work communities that thrived in their diversity, generating conversations and projects addressing the cultural, social and political concerns of their time.
‘What do you imagine when hearing the word Modernism?’ is a question Andrea Geyer likes to ask. What formed that imagination? How do artists and artworks enter the canon of institutionalized histories? How do their ideas, their knowledge, their relations become recognizable to a student, a researcher, a scholar or a museum visitor?
Works include Revolt, They Said, a drawing delineating a network of 900 women without whom the American cultural landscape would not be as we know it today; Constellations, collages that honor women like Jessie Redmon Fauset, a graduate of Cornell University who went on to be the editor of “The Crisis,” holding “literary soirées with much poetry … but little to drink, according to her contemporary Langston Hughes and Time Fold, photographs of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s notebooks. All the works in the exhibition share a commitment not only to the pasts they draw from, but to the potentials and imagination the silence they refer to can spark.
The diagram of Revolt, They Said, becomes a blue print for social change, the backdrop curtains for a scene, the torn-out pages from a script that was taken home, and a coat which redresses the institutional gallery walls into a home. Geyer’s relationships with objects and space phenomenologically map themselves against one another, denying adhesion to the social understanding of their objectness, calling attention to themselves while being self-critical of their own omissions. Of a shawl, Stein penned in her book Tender Buttons, “A shawl is a hat and hurt and a red balloon and an under coat and a sizer… A shawl is a wedding, a piece of wax a little build. A shawl.” Geyer’s objects, too, each come with their own self-declarations and autonomy—curtains, a ladder, newspapers, a coat. Geyer’s research and creative practice ruminate on this model, breaking down hierarchies into their smallest denominators—not lingering on just the biographies of people, but exalting the relationships between them; not rendering bodies and objects, but building sculptures which question the difference; not illustrating authorship or idea, but scrutinizing the way the words fit together on a page.
Andrea Geyer
Collective Weave: Andrea Geyer
Handwerker Gallery
201 Muller Center
Ithaca College
Ithaca, NY 14850
31 January 2018 - 1 March 2018
