Yearly Archives: 2018

Lucy R. Lippard Essay for the Marietta Tintoretto Story

Prolific author and arts writer Lucy R. Lippard contributed a deep and insightful essay for my 1994-1998 touring exhibition, The Marietta Robusti Tintoretto Story. I am honored to share Lucy’s essay with you below. The work celebrates the life of a near forgotten woman artist. Two paintings from this series are included in the Museo Italo Americano’s 40th Anniversary Permanent Collection Exhibit, on display until January in San Francisco.


A Legacy Framed

Commentary by Lucy R. Lippard *

 

Marietta Leis is reframing the life of Marietta Robusti Tintoretto, who died 400 years ago. She does this literally by making ornate gold frames an integral part of the work; and she does it figuratively, creating a series of metaphors for today’s women artists.

Leis weaves invisible references to her own life with more visible references to that of Marietta Tintoretto. The frames are cast with significant personal belongings, and she was attracted to the Renaissance artist because Marietta was also her mother’s name, and her mother had decided not to seek a career in the arts. Thus, with the aid of a feminist consciousness, a classic 20th-century woman’s story was contrasted with the total support that Tintoretto received from her famous father who dressed her in boy’s clothing, taught her all he knew, and was delighted by her success as a portrait painter. Even as a married woman, she stayed under her father’s roof (and Leis suggests that the father-daughter bonds were so strong that Marietta never found her own voice). Yet no sooner had she died in childbirth at the age of thirty, Tintoretto’s work began to be forgotten, until today scholars definitively attribute only one painting to her.

This is precisely why women artists have to think seriously about “posterity”; it is why Judy Chicago is making such an effort to have her feminist icon—The Dinner Party, permanently housed; it is why so many women artists look anxiously to museums to care for their work. It is, above all, why we know so little about our feminist art history. For centuries women artists’ work has been disappearing, sometimes beneath better-known male names. It is already possible to see the history of the most recent wave of feminist art (beginning in 1969-70) being hidden, forgotten, and rewritten by those who were not there.

Leis’s exhibition of lyrical, painstaking homages to another Marietta brings these issues to the foreground. At the same time, her works serve as bridges from the sense of formal beauty we inherit from the Italian painting tradition to today’s feminist investigations of opulence and reclamation. Even as their loving detail makes a point of scale, and their fragmentation makes a point of history, the very weight of these small works belie their size. They join Chicago’s Great Ladies, May Steven’s monumental Artemesia Gentileschi, and Miriam Schapiro’s homages to Mary Cassatt and other foremothers to whom all feminists must pledge memory, lest our contemporaries also be lost. These elegant frames protect both the art of Marietta Tintoretto and the art of Marietta Leis.

 

* Written for the brochure for the exhibition Excerpts from the series: The Marietta Robusti Tintoretto Story at the Jonson Gallery of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

Yearly Archives: 2018

Poet Miriam Sagan Writes on my work for Harnessing Light Exhibition

The esteemed Santa Fe poet, Miriam Sagan, saw the Harnessing Light exhibition and wrote this poem about my art that was inspired by the dark light of Iceland. Sagan had been to and referred me to the Gullkistan Artist Residency in Iceland so we had the same experience to relate to—one as a poet and myself a visual artist. Please read her lovely poem HERE.

Yearly Archives: 2018

Harnessing Light Exhibition at the Harwood Museum


The Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, NM will be presenting my work in the exhibition Harnessing Light:

Where: Harwood Museum of Art, Taos
Opening Reception: Saturday August 4, 3-5pm
Dates: Saturday August 4-Sunday October 7
Artists: Marietta Patricia Leis, Debbie Long & Mary Shaffer
Curator: J. Matthew Thomas
Roundtable Panel: Aurthur Bell Auditorium, Tuesday, August 7, 7pm

New Mexico based artist Marietta Patricia Leis will be exhibiting her multimedia works with artists Debbie Long and Mary Shaffer in the exhibition Harnessing Light. Curator J. Matthew Thomas selected these 3 artists who by different paths converge on a common focus: light on surface. Leis’ art contributes a contrast to the other artists as she captures light’s tenebrous illumination of darkness in her graphite acrylic pieces, prints on metal, small sculptures and oil paintings on wood. Her approach to this marriage of two extremes presents us with a duality of lightness and dark, for without one there cannot be the other. Becoming immersed in the soft nebulous incandescence of the arctic, Leis’ eyes forgot the programming of modern artificial lighting and she began to see the nuances and elegant shades of darkness more clear. Leis’ intention is to present unique visions of the natural world. Through her art, she hopes to make viewers more acutely aware of the fragile beauty and tenuous future of our planet so that we may seek ways to preserve it for generations. Taos was Leis’ first home in New Mexico after she migrated from Los Angeles in 1982. She considers her time in Taos as decompressing and centering after years of working in the endlessly illuminated cityscapes of New York and LA. Leis is honored to be exhibiting at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, and feels a deep gratitude for the place that gave her such peace and serenity.