STAGING - The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

This exhibition marks the solo museum debut of Bonnie Lucas. Over a fifty-five-year career Lucas has grounded her practice in an exploration of capacious hyper femininity. Spanning collages, assemblages, cast plaster reliefs, watercolors, and paintings, from the 1970s to today, Lucas draws inspiration from her childhood, feminism, nature, and surrealism. This exhibition will include important examples from major series since the 1970s as well as the debut of new work.

While a graduate student at Rutgers University, Lucas created a series of "fabric collages." Petite, and cream-colored, Lucas accumulated small feminine objects—buttons, beads, trinkets, ribbons, and more—and combined them with undulating and spiraling patterns of yarn. Backed with felt, these intricate and intimate networks became feminized microcosms, aligning her with contemporaries like Miriam Shapiro, Louise Bourgeois, and Lucas Samaras, who too integrated craft and autobiography into their work.

In 1979, Lucas moved to Lower Manhattan, where she has lived and worked at the same address for forty-seven years. During the 1980s, her compositions grew in scale, depth, and physicality. Shopping became an integral aspect of her process. For nearly five decades, Lucas has purchased inexpensive consumer items she says that are targeted to women and girls from dollar, discount, and craft outlets. These objects overloaded with clichéd signifiers of prettiness and sweetness, including toys, clothing, and dolls, relate to her own girlhood in the 1950s. 

With works often dominated by soft pinks and creams, Lucas references a gendered color palette associated with ideas of frivolity and delicacy, while simultaneously dismantling it. She sews together the fragmented pieces to create dense assemblages containing surreal storylines that fracture the socially conditioned meanings they were designed to project. Dolls, often dismembered, become female characters, perhaps stand-ins for the artist herself. At times, her figures expel or emit beauty she says from the inside out.
 
Her “cast plaster plaques,” wall-based bas-reliefs begun in 2001, preserve and commemorate the remains of hyper feminine objects set within pictorial arrangements entombed in plaster. The natural world is a repeating motif, as her heroines are intertwined or hybridized with flowers and plants. This is particularly pronounced in the artist’s watercolors and paintings stretching over many decades. For Lucas, such extreme femininity challenges traditional, often patriarchal restrictions, and functions as a metaphor for unrestrained imagination.

Bonnie Lucas: Material Girls, A Survey is organized by the Museum’s Diana Bowes Chief Curator Amy Smith-Stewart.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the artist’s first museum catalogue with an essay by the curator.

Bonnie Lucas was born in 1950 in Syracuse, New York. Lucas has lived and worked in New York City since 1979. Lucas completed a BA in Art History from Wellesley College and an MFA from Rutgers University. Her work has been exhibited at venues including  ILY2, New York, NY and Portland, OR; Trotter & Sholer, New York, NY; RUSCHWOMAN, Chicago, IL; JTT, New York, NY; 17ESSEX, New York, NY; Po Kim Art Gallery, New York, NY; Avenue B Gallery, New York, NY; P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York, NY; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; The Painting Center, New York, NY;  Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, MI; Art in General, New York; NY;  DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; The Textile Museum, Tilburg, Netherlands; The Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ; Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, NY; Islip Art Museum, East Islip, NY; New York Academy for the Arts, New York, NY; Franklin Furnace, New York, NY; Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, WA, and more.