Book Party April 20, 2023 Sari Dienes: Who I Am?!
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Garner Art Center exhibition March 11-April 23
https://hudsonvalley.town.news/g/nanuet-ny/n/148119/lost-and-found-sari-dienes-art-no-limits-rediscovered
3-07-2023 8:09pm
Lost and Found: Rediscovering Sari Dienes’ Groundbreaking Artwork
Robert Brum Contributo
r
Sari Dienes. Photo by Peter Moore © Northwestern University
“Bones, lint, Styrofoam, banana skins, the squishes and squashes found on the street: nothing is so humble that it cannot be made into art.”
So spoke Sari Dienes, who spent 30 years creating mixed-media artwork at her Rockland County home from those and other humble objects.
Dubbed the “doyenne of the American avant-garde,” Sari (the S pronounced as in sugar) lived from 1961 until her death at age 92 at the Gate Hill Cooperative, known as “The Land,” off Willow Grove Road in the Town of Haverstraw.
There she was part of a community that included composers John Cage and David Tudor, choreographer Merce Cunningham, early music revivalist LaNoue Davenport, ceramicists Karen Karnes and M.C. Richards, and experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek.
A descendant of Hungarian nobility, Dienes’ stature in the art world stretched back to the 1950s. She counted Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Yoko Ono among her friends. In fact, Ono and husband John Lennon visited her at The Land in 1976 during one of the community’s legendary picnics.
A retrospective of Dienes’ groundbreaking work will be on exhibit March 11-April 23 at GARNER Arts Center, in the Harris Gallery of the Garnerville complex’s new Building 35 exhibition space.

Manhole Wild II, 1955 street rubbing
Copyright © Sari Dienes Foundation/Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York, NY.
The exhibit, comprising works from the Sari Dienes Foundation, includes prints from the 1950s through 1966, said Barbara Pollitt of Pomona, the foundation’s curator.
Pollitt describes Dienes’ art as “experimental and responsive. Sari, as a Zen Buddhist, believed that the human experience of art was very much a present response to what she called reality. She would do whatever she felt like without having any sense of limitation or hesitancy to experiment. She was quite sometimes a risk-taker in terms of actually using material.”
Dienes created prints using a roller called a printmaker’s brayer to lift ink impressions from sidewalk grates, manhole covers, pieces of wood, ancient rock carvings known as petroglyphs — anything with a textured surface, often juxtaposing the industrial design of manmade things with nature.
“This was part of Sari’s business, to see beauty in things that were seen to be discards. … Everything revealed some kind of artistic revelation, no matter what it was,” Pollitt said.
Pollitt met Dienes through her husband, composer Rip Hayman, who she said rescued the artist’s work at The Land after her death.
“We basically saved her 60-year career from the dumpster,” she said. “She didn’t have any family but she had a foundation. … We built a barn in our yard to house the collection, because Sari was impoverished.”
Dienes, whose work has been exhibited at MoMA and The Whitney, worked in a wide range of media, including painting, drawing, textile design, sculpture and ceramics over a career spanning more than 60 years. She co-owned the Ear Inn on Spring Street in lower Manhattan with Rip Hayman.
After the hurricane

Photo of the 2011 GARNER Arts collapse during Hurricane
by Irene Cathy McErlean-Goddard.
The GARNER Arts exhibit is something of a rescue mission for Dienes’ legacy: A 2011 retrospective of her work was wrecked by Hurricane Irene, which flooded the center and ruined half the works on display — including Bone Fall, a cascade of bones she collected over a 25-year period.
“This is a big celebration,” Pollitt said. “This is a magnificent moment for the community.” She called GARNER’s Building 35 “just incredible. It is a state-of-the-art exhibition space.”
Pollitt, who edited a recently published book about Dienes titled, Who I Am?!, said Dienes was encouraging to aspiring artists, but carried with her “a sense of impoverished aristocracy” because of her background. Her grandmother was a baroness whose fortune was gambled away by Dienes’ father, according to the foundation.
“She always felt that she deserved more than she was getting, which was right, but it meant she had kind of a chip on her shoulder that was sometimes offensive to people,” Pollitt said.
Viewers of Dienes’ artwork are drawn in by her mysterious and surprising creative process, Pollitt said.
“Why is it that anything in this work that you could think of as a mistake looks like a purposeful stroke?” she posited.
Sari Dienes Exhibition

Seat of Joy, 1966 rubbing.
Copyright © Sari Dienes Foundation/Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York, NY.
Related articles by this author:
Legend of ‘The Land’ lives on after more than six decades
Jasper Johns’ Stony Point Studio Rebranded as Guesthouse
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https://mailchi.mp/cf0e909d81f6/member-show-opens-this-weekend-242109?e=6d3aef9fb1
Sari’s work “I Spy/Traveling Kit” c. 1950 is being featured at this upcoming exhibition at the Corning Museum of Glass.
May 15, 2022 – January 8, 2023
More than 10 distinct vignettes will investigate how the Museum can broaden voices and narrative in our galleries. Generally, labels that accompany objects in museum galleries are written by museum curators and educators—and often focus on just one of an almost infinite number of possible stories and meanings. In this exhibition, objects—either alone or as a group—and their stories provide an entry point for further conversation.
Exhibition visitors will be introduced to the idea that the stories objects tell are always evolving. In fact, it is happening around them in the exhibition space. Visitors will be able to share their thoughts and add their ideas to the exhibition.
https://mamc-saint–etienne-fr.translate.goog/fr/expositions/house-dust?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc
datesFrom November 19, 2022 to April 10, 2023
VenueMA
MC+
Echoing its programming attentive to female artists, the MAMC+ is offering a new display of collections aimed at improving the visibility of female creation, which represents only around 4% of its 20,000 works.
This exhibition borrows its title from a key work by Alison Knowles recently acquired by the Museum. American visual artist and poetess, co-founder of the Fluxus movement, Alison Knowles created The House of Dust in 1967 , a multimedia installation operating on the model of a performance, a reference work which constitutes one of the very first computer poems of art history. It stands at the crossroads of IT innovation, conceptual art — through its administrative aesthetics — and Fluxus.
The exhibition brings together some forty artists within a journey that intertwines generations (from the 1960s to today), nationalities and disciplines. The project benefits from a partnership with the Center National des Arts Plastiques, which is providing the loan of some fifty works for the occasion, the majority of which will join the Museum’s collection on deposit.
If this exhibition is based on the criterion of gender, it does not claim to essentialize female creation in art, but rather seeks to pursue the inclusive policy of the establishment, the rereading of its history and the discovery of its unknown or newly acquired funds. . This all-female journey, bringing together more than 130 works — paintings, installations, photographs, design, etc. — thus explores three main themes illustrating common and recurring concerns among these contemporary creators: language, body and matter.
Guided tours of the exhibition (from 15 years old) :
( In bold: the works of these artists belong to the collections of the CNAP – National Center for Plastic Arts – and are on loan to the MAMC+):
Magdalena Abakanowicz , Marina Abramović, Laurie Anderson, Eleanor Antin, Geneviève Asse, Anna-Eva Bergman, Louise Bourgeois, Lisetta Carmi, Sarah Charlesworth , Marieta Chirulescu, Marinette Cueco , Sari Dienes , Thea Djordjadze, Nathalie Du Pasquier , Gloria Friedmann, Shirley Goldfarb , Nan Goldin, Jan Groover, Guerrilla Girls, Sheila Hicks , Jenny Holzer, Dorothy Ianonne, Kimsooja, Karen Knorr, Alison Knowles, Barbara Kruger, Laura Lamiel , Helen Levitt, Annette Messager, Tania Mouraud, Gina Pane , Sheila Reid, Takako Saito , Valentine Schlegel, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Jessica Stockholder, Nathalie Talec, Tatiana Trouvé, Jackie Winsor

Alexandre Quoi
Head of the MAMC+ scientific department
A publication will be published in the “Collection of collections” series which promotes different collections highlighted in the context of the annual MAMC+ exhibitions.
nearly 40 artists
more than 130 works
MUSEUM COLLECTIONS & CNAP LOANS
1960 – 2020

Dates
https://www.kunstverein-wiesbaden.de/en/event/opening-fluxus-sex-ties-hier-spielt-die-musik

JUNE 11–JULY 30, 2022


Sherwood Studio Building, 58 West 57th Street. Photo c.1902-03.
McClain Gallery presents two simultaneous solo exhibitions of historic works by Sari Dienes (1898–1992) and Addie Herder (1920–2009).
Dienes and Herder’s distinctive creative paths overlapped in the storied Sherwood Studios during the 1950s and 1960s. Sherwood Studios at 58 West 57th Street, New York, NY was built as a home to artists and writers in the nineteenth century and remained active until 1960. Both artists were adventurous in their approach to material experimentation, incorporating found objects in a way that exposed their keen awareness of the urban environment they inhabited. We are grateful to Pavel Zoubok Fine Art for their collaboration on these exhibitions.
SARI DIENES
During a career that spanned over six decades, Sari Dienes worked in a wide range of media, creating paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, textile designs, sets and costumes for theater and dance, sound-art installations, mixed-media environments, music, and performance art. This exhibition focuses on Dienes’ work from the early 1950s and traces her evolution through the 1960s when she rejected her formal training to begin experimenting with new materials and techniques. The shift in her practice from painting and drawing towards “rubbings,” layering urban textures of

Sari Dienes, Menomonie 7, c. 1966, rubbing on fabric, 35 x 28 inches
manhole covers and sidewalks and assemblages of found objects into all-over abstraction can be firmly located in the Sherwood Studios. Upon taking up residency there in 1945, Dienes met and began a lifelong friendship with composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. She quickly established herself in the epicenter of the art world during the 1950s, influencing artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko, and Ray Johnson. Though widely exhibited during her lifetime, Dienes’ legacy is dominated by her powerful monoprints of subway grates and manhole covers. This exhibition articulates a formal sensibility that permeated all she created, tracking the development of her body of work through exuberant explorations in frottage, collage, and assemblage.
Dienes was born in Debreczen, Hungary, in 1898. From 1928–1935, she moved to Paris and then London where she studied with Fernand Léger, Amédée Ozenfant, André Lhote, and Henry Moore. In 1939, Dienes relocated to New York, where she would remain until her death.

Sari Dienes’ Sidewalk Rubbings in Bonwit Teller windows, New York, 1955 – photos Virginia Roehl
Dienes exhibited nationally and internationally from the early 1940s, with notable exhibitions at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City and later as a founding member of the Feminist collective, A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been included in major museum exhibitions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, Massachusetts; and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut. Recent exhibitions at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California; The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; The Drawing Center, New York, New York; Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York, New York; Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills, California; the Philadelphia Art Alliance at University of the Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and McClain Gallery, Houston, Texas as well as new scholarship on her work have renewed interest in her life and work. Visit the Sari Dienes Foundation website for a narrative timeline.
“Armed with an ink roller, she mapped her urban haunts as well as her body’s movement; uneven and ghostly skeins of pigment document her repetitive application of a standard-size brayer across the surface. Dienes placed drawing at the center of her practice while simultaneously challenging traditionally held views about the medium.”
–text excerpt from Sari Dienes’ 2014 solo exhibition at The Drawing Center, NYC, New York.
SARI DIENES

Presented at The Broken Hill Art Exchange in outback N.S.W Australia.
https://mailchi.mp/pavelzoubok/upcoming-program-and-gallery-artist-news-4771898?e=cb1ff62ada

Sari Dienes
Oct 22-Dec 10, 2021
Art Alliance
The Philadelphia Art Alliance at University of the Arts is pleased to present the first Philadelphia exhibition of works by Sari Dienes.
A brief litany of Sari Dienes’ life only begins to point to her importance. She was born Sari Chylinska in Hungary in October 1898. In her late teens she studied dance under Raymond Duncan, the brother of Isadora. She married Paul Dienes at age 24. After moving to Wales for work, she began working in textile design. In her 30s, she decided to become a visual artist and studied with Fernand Leger, Ande L’hote and Amadee Ozenfant.
She was later appointed assistant director of the Ozenfant School in London, where she hired the young Henry Moore. During a trip to the United States in 1939, she was stranded due to World War II. In the 1940s, Dienes exhibited at the New School, studied printmaking with Stanley Hayter, and taught at Parsons School of Design, the Brooklyn Museum School of Art and in her own studio. She attended The Club and showed her abstract work at Betty Parsons Gallery.
Dienes’ experimental work vastly expanded what was permissible in the visual arts. She was an early influence on younger artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who assisted Dienes in her practice of making textural rubbings in Manhattan.
Her junk constructions were included in MoMA’s Art of Assemblage exhibit. In her 70s, Dienes moved to Stony Point near John Cage and Merce Cunningham. She experimented with color Xerox, made silkscreen murals for the New York State House and became a founding member of AIR Gallery, the first women’s cooperative in New York.
In addition to Dienes’ works, the second floor of the Art Alliance includes analogous efforts by several artists. A small Rachel Rosenthal ink drawing will be juxtaposed with a sensitive linear drawing by Dienes. Rosenthal and Dienes were influential in introducing Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns to each other in the late 1950s, and all enjoyed soirees in Dienes’ 57th Street loft.
The exhibition includes mail art correspondence by Ray Johnson, who was a friend of all of the above, and a Dienes frottage of Johnson’s arms quite similar to later rubbing examples by Johns in his prints. There is an early collage painting by Suzi Gablik who attended Black Mountain College with Johnson and Rauschenberg and later helped curate the important show Pop Art Redefined with John Russell. Paintings by Carlos Bunga exhibit some of the same material sensibilities as exemplified by Dienes. And, not last, is a marvelous assemblage portrait of Sari Dienes by Lenore Tawney.
The Philadelphia Art Alliance at University of the Arts is grateful to Pavel Zoubok Gallery and the Sari Dienes Foundation for their assistance in implementing this exhibition.
Our exhibitions are free and open to the public.
Philadelphia Art Alliance at University of the Arts
251 S 18th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
Top image:
Sari Dienes, Central Park, c. 1954.
Ink rubbing on Webril mounted to four-panel screen
38 1/2 x 120 inches
Copyright © Sari Dienes Foundation/Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York, NY. Courtesy of Pavel Zoubok Fine Art, NY.
Second Image:
Suzi Gablik, Victorian Still Life, 1961.
Collage and oil paint on canvas, 12.25 x 11.5 inches (13 x 12 inches frame size).
Collection of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. Anonymous Donor.
sponsored by Women in the Arts via Zoom
Meeting invite
WIA Monthly Meeting Newsletter SEPTEMBER 2021
3 pages
Wednesday September 22, 2021 6-8 PM
Is our first meeting of the Fall season
WIA presents a very exciting season filled with speakers, and events. Meeting Dates to remember: October 20, November 17, December 15, January 19, 2022.
Agenda: September 22, 6- 8 PM
Zoom INVITE: we use the same hashtag for both meetings
so be mindful of the joining time
Tobey Soller is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: WIA Board and Monthly Meeting
Time: Sep 22, 2021 05:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
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Meeting ID: 854 4219 4821
Passcode: 784606
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2 films:
Hats, Bottles and Bones by Martha Edelheit
Sari Dienes: A Life In Art Part 1A

Enjoy this article by James Melchiorre about Sari’s work at the Churchyard in 1953!
https://trinitywallstreet.org/stories-news/trinity-tombstone-tracings-art-sari-dienes
Join us for a 6:00 gallery walk through Webinaire Thursday July 15th 6:00 – 8:00 P
followed by a 7:00 screening of an interview by painter Ce Roser, founder of
Women In the Arts.
https://rocklandartcenter.org/roca/the-luminary-artists-of-rockland-sari-dienes-a-virtual-presentation-via-zoom-with-rip-hayman-and-barbara-pollitt-of-the-sari-dienes-foundation-2.html