Verley Jean-Luc (dir.), Survival Art, exh. cat., Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, 12 February–16 March 1975, Paris, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1975
Survival Art : Hessie ARC 2, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 12 February–16 March 1975
→Hessie : Silence, BF15, Lyon, 8 April–28 May 2016
Franco-Jamaican visual artist.
We know that this elusive artist, who cultivated mystery and anonymity, lived in New York for a spell, and married a painter, Dado (Miodrag Djuric). Highly suspicious of discourse, she preferred to let her art speak for itself. She opted for embroidery, a rather anonymous art form, as her art form of choice. Using common materials (linen, cotton, needles, buttons), she turned the overly hierarchical art world on its head. Long discredited, needlework eventually managed to conquer the sacred space that canvas had occupied until then, a symbol for a history of art written by men. Thus, she belonged to the “New Penelopes”, a term coined by art critic Aline Dallier to describe artists who subverted this symbol by adopting a distinctly feminine language. By playing with figuration and abstraction, presence and absence, they developed a highly complex vocabulary disproving embroidery’s reputation as a simplistic and archaic practice.