Jane Abrams: Fire on the Water, organized by Aaron Wilder, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Roswell Museum, underscores the consequences of her 1985-86 residency at the Roswell Artist in Residency Program (RAiR). Throughout nearly fifteen years prior to her residency, Abrams taught in the University of New Mexico’s then poorly-ventilated printmaking studios, an environment that seriously eroded her health. The year-long hiatus at RAiR provided the artist with time, resources, and motivation to leave printmaking (for the most part) and dramatically recalibrate to painting, an adjustment that literally saved her life. Abrams returned to UNM to teach painting and drawing and retired in 1993. She currently lives and works in Los Ranchos de Albuquerque.
Of the exhibition’s thirty-eight works ranging from 1968 to 2022, twenty-seven from the 1980s and 90s chronicle Abrams’s pivot and metamorphosis at RAiR. Seven color intaglios from 1982-84 represent an apex of her printmaking while at UNM.
Installation view, “Jane Abrams: Fire on the Water,” Roswell Museum.
In the intaglio, Fumbling at the Speed of Light (1983), a geometry of hands and fingers reach into the image to heckle and spin a square continent, perhaps stand-ins for the artist’s hands and the plate from which this print is created. This fury floats above an imaginary plat map softened by a weather system of whimsical marks and tonal adjustments. Fumbling at the Speed of Light holds endless mutations, deviations created from cuts, abrasions, and erosions, inflicted on the plate(s) by hand and with acid. Along with matrix preparation, Abrams fully exploits inking, and a host of other technical experiments during proofing and editioning.
Jane Abrams, “Fumbling at the Speed of Light,” 1983, intaglio, 14.75 x 18 inches. © Jane Abrams
Abrams’s prints from the 1960s and 70s are more self-contained. Three impressions from 1968-70 combine engraving and screenprinting and kindle a whimsical, meticulously hairy eroticism nestled in tight compositions. Invitation to Dinner (1969), for example, solicits a supper of oral-genital stimulation frosted by engraved fur. Abrams’s carnal amusements continued through the 1970s and included seven lithographs done at Tamarind Institute, unfortunately, none of which are in this exhibition.
Jane Abrams, “Invitation to Dinner,” 1969, screen print, engraving and wax, image: 4.5 x 7 inches. © Jane Abrams
Paintings generated during and since her RAiR residency, like Clara’s Boat/Fire on the Water (1985), are among works at the epicenter of Abrams’s evolution as a painter. The aforementioned tendrils of engraved hair disappear into the paint of fire, flaring from cool, undulating water. Abrams walks through the permeable map of Fumbling at the Speed of Light, and into geographies of dreams; cryptic personal narratives unravel. Her portraits of abandoned skiffs drift and sink, lost or secret souls. In more than one sense, her work weaves real and imagined strands of tangled narratives.
Jane Abrams, “Clara’s Boat/Fire on the Water,” 1985, oil on canvas, 52 x 72 inches. © Jane Abrams
Abrams traveled to South Asia, China, Spain, Honduras, Guatemala, and Florida’s Everglades, all rendezvous to experience and rally the primal energies that animate the earth and its flora. Saturated color, often mixed with wax, cradles the chemistry of her flora. Belching mountains, like the volcano Pacaya (1996) near Antigua, Guatemala, vomit smoldering liquid from its digestive tract. This molten mulch renews the earth’s surface. Abrams’s scapes are nothing less than invocations of the catalysts that glaze the earth.
Jane Abrams, “Pacaya,” 1996, oil on linen, 58 x 52 inches. Photo: Patrick Carr. © Jane Abrams
Seeking health and well-being, Abrams embraced Ayurveda, medicine practiced throughout Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka. She learned Sanskrit and immersed herself in Ayurvedic methods that combine herbal medicines, special diets, meditation, yoga, and massage. In the 1990s she began carving jelutong, wood from a tree that rises up to 200 feet and grows in Malaysia, Borneo, Sumatra, and southern Thailand. Growing up in northwestern Wisconsin, she recalled watching her father work with wood, a memory that comforted and encouraged this new path. Many of these polychrome reliefs were petitions or votive tableaux to Hindu demigods and Ayurvedic conventions. Gifts of the Sacred Grove (1994-5), a polychrome wood reliquary, cradles seven vials of healing supplements in a verdant coffer. Mudra-Alchemy Seminar (1995) exposes a cross-section of the artist’s profiled head, her brain afire with gold leaf, surrounded by vegetation, as a right hand touches her cerebrum in a Surya mudra...a gesture to remove foreign elements. Other polychrome relief carvings summon tribute or commemoration. Sor Juana (1992-3), for example, frames a self-portrait, her torso and arms scarred with twenty-seven lacerations, and suggests a kinship between the artist and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the 1648-1695 Spanish-Criolla nun from New Spain celebrated as a writer, philosopher, composer, poet, and feminist.
Jane Abrams, “Gifts of the Sacred Grove,” 1994-5, carved and polychrome jelutong wood with glass vials with herbal remedies, copper and gold leaf, 11.5 x 12 x 4 inches. Photo: Patrick Carr. © Jane Abrams
Jane Abrams, “Sor Juana,” 1992-3, carved and polychrome jelutong wood with glass and gold leaf, 15 x 12 x 1.75 inches. Photo: Patrick Carr. © Jane Abrams
Something changed around the beginning of the new millennium. Sunlight infused Abrams’s palette. The dark, haunting, almost apocalyptic, visions tapered. The waterfalls of vegetation that often windowed obscure and secluded anecdotes ebbed. Her plants now wall us off from its machinations. They have no center. Dense fields of pulsing, zoetic flora inhibit encroachment. Flowering plants, especially, dared our meddling but at the risk of being consumed. Capricorn Morning (2011), and so many other paintings from 2000 to the present, materialize Abrams’s search for the nucleus, the vital center… some palisade of verdant energy. These paintings confront us. Their density undermines our illusory authority or dominance over the vitality of soil and seeds.
Jane Abrams, “Capricorn Morning,” 2011, oil on linen, 58 x 52 inches. Photo: Patrick Carr. © Jane Abrams
While a bit lopsided in its temporal range, the thirty-eight works in Fire on the Water probe five-plus decades of Abrams’s work with fitting scrutiny. The selection, however, seems to have been constrained by proximity, that is what artworks were available for exhibition within one or two van journeys. Thirty of the works, for example, are from the artist’s studio. My guess is that scanning further afield was moderated by finances, not curatorial desire.
Modest flaws aside, the Roswell Museum and its newish (since late 2021) curator, Aaron Wilder, parent one of the more dynamic and consequential schedules of 20th and 21st-century art of the American Southwest…in a city of some 50,000 inhabitants huddled in the heart of “little Texas.” A critical facet is the reciprocity since the 1960s between the Roswell Museum (opened in 1937) and the Donald B. Anderson (now the RAiR Foundation)-backed Roswell Artist in Residency Program (RAiR) (opened in 1967). Artists spend a year in residence providing the Museum’s staff ample time to curate an exhibition of their work. After the artists leave, the Museum follows them, curating “catch up” solo and group exhibitions. The Roswell Museum’s match with the RAiR Foundation is now legendary and its current progeny is Fire on the Water.
Jane Abrams: Fire on the Water is at the Roswell Museum from August 3, 2024, through January 12, 2025.
