SkowheganTALKS, a lecture series organized by the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, features conversations between some of the most influential visual artists working today. The third talk of the second season of the series includes a conversation between artists Judy Pfaff, Jessica Stockholder, and Cheryl Donegan.

Judy Pfaff received a BFA from Washington University, Saint Louis (1971) and an MFA from Yale University (1973). Balancing intense planning with improvisational decision-making, Pfaff creates exuberant, sprawling sculptures and installations that weave landscape, architecture, and color into a tense yet organic whole. A pioneer of installation art in the 1970s, Pfaff synthesizes sculpture, painting, and architecture into dynamic environments in which space seems to expand and collapse, fluctuating between the two- and three-dimensional. Pfaff’s site-specific installations pierce through walls and careen through the air, achieving lightness and explosive energy. Pfaff’s work is a complex ordering of visual information composed of steel, fiberglass, and plaster as well as salvaged signage and natural elements such as tree roots. She has extended her interest in natural motifs in a series of prints integrating vegetation, maps, and medical illustrations, and has developed her dramatic sculptural materials into set designs for several theatrical stage productions. Pfaff has received many awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award (2004); a Bessie (1984); and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1983) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1986). She has had major exhibitions at the Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison (2002); Denver Art Museum (1994); St. Louis Art Museum (1989); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (1982); and the Whitney Museum, New York (1975, 1981, 1987). Pfaff represented the United States in the 1998 São Paolo Bienal.

Jessica Stockholder studied painting at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, received her BFA from the University of Victoria, and received an MFA from Yale University. Stockholder is a pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations that have become a prominent language in contemporary art. Her site-specific interventions and autonomous floor and wall pieces have been described as “paintings in space.” Stockholder’s complex installations incorporate the architecture in which they have been conceived, blanketing the floor, scaling walls and ceiling, and even spilling out of windows, through doors, and into the surrounding landscape. Her work is energetic, cacophonous, and idiosyncratic, but close observation reveals formal decisions about color and composition, and a tempering of chaos with control. In a single work, Stockholder deploys a myriad of materials that might include bales of hay, fruit, toys, laundry baskets, curtains, heat lamps, fans, yarn, newspaper, bowling balls, automobiles, and construction materials—bricks, concrete, plywood, and Sheetrock. Bringing the vibrant, Technicolor-plastic products of consumer culture to her work, she adds paint, calibrating each color orchestrating optical and spatial impact. Stockholder’s installations, sculptures, and collages affirm the primacy of pleasure, the blunt reality of things, and the rich heterogeneity of life, mind, and art amid a vortex of shifting polarities—abstraction/realism, classical order/intuitive expressionism, conscious thought/unconscious desire. Stockholder is Director of Graduate Studies in Sculpture at Yale University. Her work has been exhibited at Dia Center for the Arts, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; P.S. 1, New York; SITE Santa Fe; the Venice Biennale; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, among others.

Cheryl Donegan received her B.F.A. in Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and an M.F.A. at Hunter College in New York. Donegan’s work integrates the time-based, gestural forms of performance and video with forms such as painting, drawing, and installation. Direct, irreverent, and infused with an ironic eroticism, Donegan’s works put a subversive spin on issues relating to sex, gender, art-making, and art history. Using her own body as metaphor, she executes performative actions before the camera; these conceptual performances often result in or relate to process paintings and drawings. Her videos have been exhibited internationally including at the 1995 Whitney Biennial, The Museum of Modern Art, and Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York; the New York Film and Video Festival; the 1993 Venice Biennale; Galerie Rizzo, Paris; the Biennale d'Art Contemporain de Lyon, France; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Donegan has had one-person shows at Lotta Hammer, London; Baumgartner Galleries, Washington, D.C.; Basilico Fine Arts and the Elizabeth Koury Gallery, New York; and has had solo exhibitions in Nice, Paris, Berlin, and Milan. She lives in New York.