Lumonics Light & Sound Gallery

Eva Hesse (Jan 11, 1936 – May 29, 1970)

“There’s not been one normal thing in my life.”

“Maybe if I really believe in me, trust me without any calculated plan, who knows what will happen?”

“Art is the easiest thing in my life, and that’s ironic. It doesn’t mean I’ve worked little on it, but it’s the only thing I never had to… I have no fear. I could take risks.”

“I am ultimately convinced that people must first be told that so and so is great, and then, after a period of given time, they come to believe it for themselves.”

“Don’t ask what the work is. Rather, see what the work does.”

“I would like the work to be non-work. This means that it would find its way beyond my preconceptions…It is the unknown quantity from which and where I want to go.”

“Chaos can be structured as non-chaos. That we know from Jackson Pollock.”

“I am interested in solving an unknown factor of art and an unknown factor of life.”

“Excellence has no sex.”

“Life doesn’t last, art doesn’t last.”

“Art and work and art and life are very connected and my whole life has been absurd. There isn’t a thing in my life that has happened that hasn’t been extreme – personal health, family, economic situations…absurdity is the key word…”

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Eva Hesse was a Jewish, German-born American artist whose innovative sculptural installations composed of textiles, latex, and fiberglass ushered in a new conceptual era of sculpture in the 1960s. Considered one the founders of Post-Minimalism, Hesse was inspired by her peers Sol Lewitt and Joseph Beuys and worked tirelessly to reject the status quo definitions of form and spatial relationships. “Chaos can be structured as non-chaos,” she once declared. Among her most important works is Hang Up (1966), a seminal exploration of space in the form of a long metal loop attached to an empty stretcher frame that broke the traditionally sacred role of the picture plane. The artist was born on January 11, 1936 in Hamburg, Germany and fled World War II due to her family’s Jewish heritage, settling in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood by 1939. Hesse studied at Cooper Union until 1957 and then she pursued her BFA from Yale University in 1959, studying under then-head Josef Albers. She emerged from the avant-garde scene in 1966 with her inclusion in Lucy Lippard’s landmark “Eccentric Abstraction” exhibition. Tragically, Hesse died on May 29, 1970 in New York, NY from a brain tumor at the age of 34, ending a brief but luminous career that only spanned ten years.
courtesy of artnet

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Eva Hesse was born in N**i Germany in 1936. She was not quite three years old when, together with her sister Helen, she was put on a children’s train to Amsterdam, where she was later rejoined with her parents and brought to New York in 1939. During the early ’40s, Eva’s beloved mother became mentally ill, was hospitalized, and then divorced from Eva’s father. Her equally loved father remarried soon after, and in 1946, when Eva was 10, her mother took her own life. Besides this loss and “abandonment,” Eva carried the fear that she might have inherited her mother’s instability and would follow the same course.
ORDER AND CHAOS: FROM THE DIARIES OF EVA HESSE
By Ellen H. Johnson, May 10, 2016, Art in America
Here are a few diary entries:

Hanging./Rubberized, loose, open cloth./Fiberglass—reinforced plastic./ Began somewhere in November–December, 1969./Worked./Collapsed April 6, 1969. I have been very ill. . . .

Try to sit up. . . . Build up some energy. Try to stay up. Have a lot of work waiting for me to get done. Other people. Waiting. Exhibitions. I don’t mean I feel pressured. I don’t. It’s kind of nice. Waiting for each thing I do. It is better than doing and no one waiting to see at all.
Dec 1969

I never did any traditional sculpture. I don’t think I ever did any traditional painting except what you call abstract expressionism. I didn’t even do much sculpture in school and once I started on my own, there wasn’t anything traditional about any of the pieces… .

Clarence Clemons, Jr., born on Jan 11, 1942
(Jan 11, 1942 – June 18, 2011)

"Racism was ever present and over the years together, we saw it. Clarence’s celebrity and size did not make him immune. I think perhaps "C" protected me from a world where it wasn’t always so easy to be an insecure, weird and skinny white boy either. But, standing together we were badass, on any given night, on our turf, some of the baddest asses on the planet."
- Bruce Springsteen
excerpt from eulogy

“I love myself when I am laughing. . . and then again when I am looking mean and impressive.”

“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”

“I have known the joy and pain of friendship. I have served and been served. I have made some good enemies for which I am not a bit sorry. I have loved unselfishly, and I have fondled hatred with the red-hot tongs of Hell. That's living.”

“I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.”
- Zora Neale Hurston (Jan 7, 1891 – Jan 28, 1960)

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A key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a novelist and anthropologist who wrote 50 published short stories, plays, and essays...although she was a central figure in the preservation of African American folklore, and considered one of the most influential African American writers, regardless of all of this, because of the timeframe in which she lived, she also struggled with intense poverty, sexism, and racism.

In 1960, when Hurston died, it was in destitution, and she was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1975, Alice Walker helped to revive an interest in Hurston’s work. Walker also found Hurston’s unmarked grave and erected a small monument to honor Zora Neale Hurston the woman and her significant contribution. (see photo)

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"We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. If they do, it is our duty as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children. If necessary, bone by bone.”
-Alice Walker, author, 1976.