(chiming music) - March is women's history month.

The time to highlight the contributions of women in the past and today.

On this episode of "The Arts Page" we feature some exceptional women in the arts.

Starting with local art collector Peg Ann, giving us a tour of eclectic art she enjoys.

Then see the fascinating ways eco-feminist artist Mira Lehr explores the evolution of nature.

Plus learn how the creations of painter Joan Snyder and sculptor Louise Nevelson stand out, but also fit in to the history of abstract art.

And hear how American writer Mabel Dodge Luhan may have helped others coping with severe depression.

"The Arts Page" starts right now.

(jazz music) Hi, I'm your host, Sandy Maxx, and welcome to "The Arts Page."

to begin this episode spotlighting women in the arts, come with us on a special tour of a personal art collection.

Milwaukee community leader Peg Ann shares several of her favorite pieces she's acquired over five decades.

- And we decided to cover me in chocolate and start taking photos.

Well, that didn't work.

(chill music) Almost all of my art has a personal story to it.

(techno music) I think so many things are art.

I have about 400 pieces of art, between chairs, which I call sculptures, and hanging art, and regular sculptures, and anything that catches your eye can be art.

You have to be a creative thinker to do that.

So I think anybody can, if they let their imagination go.

Art should give you inspiration.

It should make you think, it should make you happy.

And my art comes with a story.

This is another one of my favorite pieces.

I have so many, it's confusing.

And this is Birdy.

We can't forget about her.

I've named her Cracked.

And one of the interesting things to me about art is that if an artist gives it a name, you can always rename it by whatever inspiration you have, or whatever you see in the art.

This piece is by Reggie Baylor, a local artist.

And I wanted something that represented my life.

So everything in here is a part of my life.

I'm a big traveler, I've traveled around the world.

I do photography, here's the camera.

I lived in a barn.

I worked and owned a manufacturing company with my former husband.

(upbeat music) I was always creative.

And that first started with interior design in my bedroom, when I was 12.

A designer once said to me, she said she invited 12 other designers over here to see how I did the interior design work.

And I said, I'm really, really nervous because I'm not formally trained.

I don't know any of the rules.

And she said, that's exactly why I want my designers to come over here, because you don't know there is a box.

It just happens to be in this hallway and gives you a choice off of the elevator to go which direction you want.

It was never intended for that.

It just happened to be one of the poses that I did.

My art comes with a story.

Some of the personal stories are that I've become friends with the artists.

This piece has tons of meaning to me, and it continues to be creative because it did not come with eyeglasses and a red nose in this.

I was in France on a buying trip.

About noon, I decided to take a stroll through this tiny village.

And I looked in the window of this place and I saw some art, and it intrigued me.

I opened the door and I walked in, and there was a Frenchman who was very kind to me and we had a language difference, but were able to still communicate.

I said, well, I'm interested in this piece, but I'm also interested in another sculpture you have.

So would you ship both of them?

And through our language barrier, he started laughing, and he said, "Yes," but he also added to that, "But would you like to go to my gallery first?"

Apparently I was in his home, I had walked into his home and asked to purchase art that he was privately holding for himself.

And he sold it to me and shipped it here.

And as a thank you, and we had such a good afternoon, he sent me an etching of his, too.

I've had art in my refrigerator for years.

And so I have a little piece from China, but other than that, everything's been made by a friend.

And one piece I call art is a can that was in my pantry, that exploded.

And now it's just sitting there in a cold refrigerator.

If I go around here, I can get overwhelmed myself, because there's so much art.

I could think all day long, all the way around this place.

Don't think you're gonna come here, everybody, and see a lot of valuable art.

It's valuable because it's special to me in my heart.

And I believe that's another part of art.

You should love it.

It should come from your heart, whether you're making it, or you're purchasing it, it should mean something to you.

- Eco-feminist artist Mira Lehr has been a champion of women artists for decades.

Through painting, sculpture, and a variety of materials, including fire, Lehr renders abstract artworks that reflect on the cycles of nature, and the evolution of our environment.

(acoustic music) - The beauty is very important to me, but I have to take the bloom off the rose.

I'm Mira Lehr, I'm an artist.

All of my work has burning of some kind in it.

And I think it does reflect both sides of creation, creation, and destruction.

And that's what nature is all about.

It's always related to the environment.

I always drew when I was a little kid, I never really knew I would be a professional artist.

As I grew older, I decided I was gonna study art history in college.

I was so lucky because at the time I graduated, the abstract expressionists were holding forth in New York, and it was a major movement.

So I was right in the middle of this really wonderful scene.

So from then on, I did art.

And I was not really into the environment as much in the beginning, I just did nature, a lot of nature studies, but eventually I heard of Buckminster Fuller, a man who was very much about the planet.

And I saw an opportunity to work with him.

In 1969, I went to New York, and I worked with him on something called "The World Game."

And that was about how to make the world work in the most efficient way, and doing more with less.

So from then on, I was hooked.

(acoustic music) I'm feeling two urgencies.

One, I'm getting older, that's an urgency.

You know, how many years do I have left?

And the other urgency is how many years does the planet have left?

So we've converged.

Every day I get up raring to go.

(mixolydian music) In the Orlando Exhibit, it was called High Water Mark because that's where we're at.

And that's where they felt my career was at.

So that show had very, very large sculptures of mangroves.

And you could walk through the mangroves, and feel you were encased in the roots, the root system.

There's something about being enclosed in the space that makes a viewer very much more attentive to what's happening.

And so I watched people walking through the mangroves, and they were all moved by it.

So that's really the first time I've done that kind of large-scale sculpture.

I love doing it.

The smaller I get, and the older I get, the bigger the work becomes, it seems to me.

And so now I'm back in the studio and I'm turning to something I'm calling Planetary Visions, because I'm doing images of earth masses.

I've also added writing, which some of it is from Bucky Fuller, about the planet.

Some of it is just poetry, about nature.

(dolorous music) I've always felt abstraction is the highest form.

Even though I like representation, but to me, abstraction gets the essence, the essence of everything.

And you can take it and go on with it.

And it's more spiritual to me.

I think like Cezanne, at the end of his life, his paintings became kind of dissolved in light, like light entities.

At the end of Rembrandt's life also, his work became less literal, and also dissolved in light.

So light is very important.

And that to me is the height of it.

If you have a light entity in your work, I think it's profound and meaningful.

The light on the big sculpture, yeah, those are special lights that grow corals in the laboratory.

And the sculpture is a shape of a wave, and it's mesmerizing.

You know, if the world pulls apart, and people are concerned just with their little everyday existence, I don't see a great future.

But I'm hoping there's still time.

The clock is definitely ticking.

And I'm not a politician, and I'm not a scientist.

The way I can express it is through my art.

And that's what I'm trying to do, along with having a wonderful experience making it.

(dolorous music) - Joan Snyder is an artist who became known for her stroke painting style in the '70s.

Louise Nevelson was a sculptor who created large structures using found objects of all kinds.

Both Snyder and Nevelson were included in an exhibit called Epic Abstraction at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Here, we get a closer look at their creations.

(jazz music) - The colorful and attractive painting behind me is "Smashed Strokes Hope" from 1971 by Joan Snyder.

Snyder is one of the contemporary artists featured in "Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera."

The exuberant color and the sense of experimentation breaks from the intense formalism of minimalism, specifically the minimalist grid that was considered to be the most desirable template, or touchstone, for composition and design for so many artists, painters, and sculptors coming of age in the late 1960s and '70s.

This is a painting on canvas, but she's using a wide range of paint.

Oil, acrylic, and spray enamel.

She's applying paint fairly traditionally in certain instances, with a sequence of very clear brushstrokes.

Most of those are with the oil paint.

But in other instances, she's exploring mark-making in other ways, her process is both additive and subtractive.

She makes strokes by adding individual brush marks, but she also executes strokes in a subtractive manner.

In some cases, scraping in to thick paint to make an absence of a stroke.

Part of the appeal of Joan Snyder's painting is that it almost expands and blows up in scale what an artist's palette might look like, where you have globs of paint, and you get a sense of the paint being mixed, and there's a sense of the full range of an artist's palette that she's preparing to use, the paint in certain instances and certain passages is piled up, it's thick, and impastoed, and coagulated.

But in other instances, she's experimenting with the paint diluted, and allowing the strokes to run and to pour over white expanses of the painting.

The painting serves as a kind of inventory or catalog of painter strokes.

Some thick, some thin, some stable, some strong, others fluid, others weak.

Snyder here walks a very fine line between experimentation and deliberation.

(jazz music) (soft music) This spectacular sculpture behind me is titled "Mrs. N's Palace."

And it's one of the great works by the American sculptor, Louise Nevelson.

It's actually composed of pieces that date back in time to as early as 1964, though it was assembled as a unique work in 1977.

"Mrs. N's Palace" is one of Nevelson's greatest works, but it hasn't been seen at the Met for many years.

Installing it here on the second floor of the Met's modern wing took quite an effort, but it was well worth it.

The work itself is comprised of about 130 individual sculptural collages, these relief collages, that then are attached to a large box.

The sculpture is comprised of scraps of detritus that she collected all across the city, creating these abstract, in many cases, relief sculptures which she then treats primarily by painting in black.

Nevelson described her materials as the skin that New York has shed, and that she is scavenging and then giving new life, making art that's both in a way about New York, but also of New York.

In many instances, her original source material is discernible without much effort.

There are boxes from filing cabinets, and from staircases, and balustrades, where she's repurposed architectural salvage, parts are quite heavy in appearance and even sort of aggressive in effect.

But other parts are lyrical, elegant, thin, whimsical, even.

In other instances, her materials are really difficult or impossible to discern, and register really as unique abstract sculpture.

The title derives from a couple of sources.

One is that her nickname in the neighborhood where she lived was Mrs. N, and palace is evocative.

She intended this work to be her ideal habitat or a kind of shrine to herself.

This is Nevelson creating her own universe, an environment that's based entirely on her own sculptural practice and her vision as an artist which in a way tied wonderfully to her desire to live her own life, on her own terms.

(jazz music) - Finally, we look at a profound aspect of Mabel Dodge Luhan.

She was an American writer of personal memoirs, and a lively patron of the arts in the early 20th century.

In this interview with the late Lois Rudnick, an expert scholar on Mabel Dodge Luhan, we get an intimate look at Luhan's life and her battle with depression.

(sad piano music) - Mabel Dodge Luhan left an indelible mark in Taos, and in leaving memoirs, she shares her inner life and struggles with depression.

What did it take for her to move forward?

- She had to explore throughout her life every conceivable cure, and there really were no cures for bipolar disorder, but manic depression, as it was called in her day.

And she finally ended up working with a variety of psychiatrists, but the most important one was the most important Freudian analyst in the United States, A.A. Brill.

And he was perhaps one of the most important mentors in her life.

He was really a close friend and mentor as well as an analyst, somebody who was, aside from his orthodoxy in Freudianism, very pragmatic.

He believed that people had to get a job.

They had to work.

They had to do something meaningful with their life.

And so when Mabel met him in a state of despair, actually, before she met him, she wrote him in the summer of 1916 and said, "If I don't see you, I won't make it to the fall."

And he wrote back and said, "Yes, you will, I'm busy."

- It must have taken a lot.

- It was really, (laughs) - It must have taken a lot of courage for her to take those steps.

- She was always very forthright.

She never necessarily followed any regimen that her doctors told her, her psychiatrists.

But Brill really knew how to deal with a woman who had intense cycles of absolute manic ecstasy, visionary moments, kind of explosive beliefs that she could change the entire world, which was part of her for most of her adult life.

And then would fall into the worst kinds of agonizing, helpless, feeling like she was at the end of the world depressions.

And he realized that one of the things she had to do was do something she could do, and she could write.

And so from the first time he ever met her, when he'd actually heard her at her salon, reading a story she'd written about her third husband, which was very powerful, he said "You have to write."

- So that's how she came to writing?

- That is how she came to writing.

When she would go in and out of despair, he would say to her, "Write, you have got to write your memoirs."

I think it was what saved her life.

I don't think she would've made it through manic depression.

I don't think she would've made it through her life if she had not been able to create an autobiographical self that could make sense of the unbelievably complex, and challenging, and difficult, and transformative changes over her life that she had.

And so writing was catharsis, she was doing what we now call writing therapy.

But actually that was part of Freud's theory that when you talk, you can work out, and pay attention to, and discover, and understand, what it is that's driving you crazy.

Unfortunately, manic depression cannot be cured solely by psychotherapy or psychoanalysis.

They didn't know that then.

But Freud and Brill were mentalists.

They did not believe taking pills or whatever was going to make a difference.

It was insight that cured.

It was talking that cured.

It was writing that cured.

- What was expected of women at this point in history?

- Well, most women were expected to be exactly what A.A. Brill said women should be.

Wives and mothers, guarding the sexual interests of the race.

He knew her at the time when she was running a salon in New York, and she was involved in modern art, and in radical politics.

And he knew he wasn't gonna ever move her into the home, where she would be sheltered and quiet.

- Did she manage to forge her own life?

- She did forge her own life, in most ways.

She always believed she needed a man to prove herself, and had to get jump started by a man encouraging her.

And yet she jump started everything.

She even said, "I wouldn't have written if Brill hadn't encouraged me to do so."

But her memoirs certainly show that if she hadn't had the experience and the wherewithal to be able to write about it and reconstruct it, and be honest, and open, and telling her story in ways that were often unbelievably unflattering to her, it wasn't Brill who did that, it was she who did that.

She forged her own life.

And she also forged her own therapy.

If she didn't like what her psychiatrists told her, she told them she didn't.

- [Megan] Do you think that she also wanted to write these to help women or help society?

- Absolutely, she said so.

So she started off writing as a personal form of therapy to try to understand herself and who she was.

And it's interesting 'cause she and Brill corresponded over 20 years.

They wrote incredible number of letters to each other.

Even when she was living in Taos, he couldn't do therapy with her, but he did therapy by letter, and she would come back and work with him in New York when she was really desperate.

And he said, "Do this, this will help you."

And he was absolutely right, but at some point after she started writing, and she wrote this in the introduction to one of her memoirs and to a friend, she said, "Why should those of us who suffered, who are malformed, who are grotesque, who lived under a social structure that denied us any form of nourishment, our goodness, why should we go on living like this, if we can be honest and open about who we are, so that those who come after us can have the peace and freedom to create a different life."

- So really, we don't get a full picture of her without exploring.

- You absolutely cannot.

And as a young person who had absolutely no complaints about my body, or soul, or mind, I didn't care that she was manic depressive, even though she announced it in her third memoir.

And then as an old person who's been through some things in my life, I said, how could I not have realized how important this was as a factor, not the factor, but also I wasn't allowed to read the psychiatric papers and the letters until the year 2000.

So I did not really have a full appreciation of what she was going through, and what she suffered.

- So at the end of the day, what is the most important part of this aspect of Mabel Dodge Luhan?

- I think the most important part is the fact that she shared it honestly and openly, that she was in no way unwilling to have people understand that she could be a monster, and that if she had not written this work and shared it with the world, I don't know, that history wouldn't be known, and people who still suffer through this and are ashamed by even announcing it would not be able to, can learn from her how fantastic it is to be able to be honest about this disease, and not hide it.

'Cause it doesn't work.

You can't hide it.

- [Megan] Well, Lois Rudnick, thank you so much for talking with us.

- A pleasure, thank you.

- That was Megan Kamerick interviewing Lois Rudnick.

I'm Sandy Maxx.

Thank you for watching, and please join us the first Thursday of each month on Milwaukee PBS, for another half-hour full of arts on "The Arts Page."

(jazz music)