Mary Weatherford

Mary Weatherford (born 1963, Ojai, California) is a Los Angeles-based painter. ^[1][2] Weatherford was raised in Southern California. Her father was a church vicar. ^[3] Growing up in and around Los Angeles, she saw a number of exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that proved to be influential, including a show of Vincent van Gogh’s work and the 1971 Art and Technology exhibition. ^[4] These formative experiences went on to inform paintings she would make as late as 2014. ^[5]

Weatherford is known for making paintings that appear abstract but reflect her experiences of specific places, people, and ideas. ^[6]

Weatherford attended Princeton University, where she received a bachelor's degree in 1984. The next year she participated in the Whitney Independent Study program, where she began to produce the large- scale target paintings for which she would first become known. ^[7] Evoking paintings by Jasper Johns and Kenneth Noland, these works were featured in a solo exhibition at Diane Brown Gallery, New York in 1990, alongside paintings of flowers that drew comparisons to the work of Andy Warhol. ^[8] The exhibition received acclaim in various publications, including The New York Times, and Weatherford was praised for her critique of modernist painting tropes from a feminist perspective. ^[9][10]

Her next bodies of work would begin to incorporate features that connected her paintings more directly to the experience of place and landscape, as well as sculptural elements that disrupted the surface of the picture plane. In the mid-1990s, these elements included shells, star fish, and sea sponges, which were applied to surfaces that had been worked with vinyl-based Flashe paint. The painted compositions were often monochromatic, but their discernible brushwork elicited comparisons to artists like Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. ^[11]

In 1999, Weatherford relocated to Los Angeles, initiating a period in which she made a number of paintings influenced by the California landscape. She produced on-site drawings of caves and cliffs at beaches in San Luis Obispo County, California. These drawings became references for paintings. ^[3] The inherent symbolism of these works emerged in part from Weatherford’s interest in American painters like Charles Burchfield, Agnes Pelton, and Georgia O’Keefe, who responded to the transcendental power of nature without representing it directly. ^[12] Another notable series from this period depicts dense views of vines that share compositional affinities with works by abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock. ^[13]

In 2012, Weatherford was invited to serve as a visiting artist at California State University at Bakersfield. ^[14] During this residency, she began to affix neon lights to the surfaces of her Flashe-stained canvases, introducing sculptural, illuminative elements that have since become hallmarks of her practice. ^[15] This series, known as the “Bakersfield Paintings,” debuted later that year at Todd Madigan Gallery and LA><ART. ^[16] Her subsequent works, which similarly feature bold, expressive brushwork punctuated by neon tubes, have been discussed in relation to Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. ^[17] Weatherford has been included in recent survey exhibitions of contemporary painting, including Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Variations: Conversations in and Around Abstract Painting at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. ^[18] A retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work will open at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY in 2020, and will travel to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, SITE Santa Fe, and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

Weatherford is represented by David Kordansky Gallery ^[19] in Los Angeles and Gagosian in New York and London. ^[20]

Selected Exhibitions

Solo:

• 1990: Diane Brown Gallery, New York, NY
• 2012: The Bakersfield Project, Todd Madigan Gallery, California State University at Bakersfield, Bakersfield, CA
• 2012: The Bakersfield Paintings, LA><ART, Los Angeles, CA
• 2014: Los Angeles, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
• 2014: Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, CA
• 2015: Redhook, Brennan & Griffin, New York, NY
• 2017: like the land loves the sea, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
• 2018: I’ve Seen Gray Whales Go By, Gagosian Gallery, New York, NY

Group:

• 2008: California Biennial 2008, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA
• 2014: Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
• 2014: Variations: Conversations in and Around Abstract Painting, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
• 2015-2016: NO MAN’S LAND: Women Artists from the Rubell Famly Collection, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL and National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.
• 2017: Between Two Worlds: Art of California, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA

Selected Publications

• 2016: Mary Weatherford: The Neon Paintings, texts by Katy Siegel, Jennifer Peterson, and Mary Weatherford with Robert Faggen, Claremont and New York: Claremont McKenna College and DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2016
• 2012: Mary Weatherford: Bakersfield Paintings, edited by Matthew Schum, Los Angeles: LA><ART, 2012

References