written by Iris Gray, artist and adjunct professor at Idaho State University. August, 2024.
Escaping its status as a dusty discipline, art history remains alive, constantly being assembled and reassembled along fresh lines of research through, among other things, the study of under-appreciated artists. Scholarly research in archives and collections is certainly responsible, but an additional site in the production of art history is in the real time discourse between instructor and students in the lecture halls of universities. This is the case because the academic classroom, at its best, is where a professor’s research meets student curiosity with the sort of reservation in judgement that cultivates an environment of open inquiry. Even an adjunct professor like me and my students here at Idaho State University participate in this process. More to the point, together we practice sight— and insight— in the appreciation of art, developing the ability to detect, in our own backyard, an artist whose distinctive body of work will continue to resonate for decades to come. I did not know Sara Joyce in life, but when I met her in her work, I knew I had encountered just this sort of artist. So, when I had the privilege to teach Modern Art at ISU in the spring of 2024, I opted to conclude our semester by way of the person and work of SARA. While her productive period is outside the chronological scope of my course (1840-1940), she is clearly a beneficiary of the modernist tradition. Indeed, introducing her to my students on our last day revealed how modernist concerns are contemporary and close to home. Traversing medium, SARA’s body of work forms a color-rich, textured picture of a relationship to the psyche (and to life) from her generous perspective incorporating sensation and feeling, social interrelatedness, an intimacy with materials, and an inherent belief in the very act of making art as impactful and profound.
Carmelia, Acrylic on Light Board 17 x 12
To prepare for our discussion, I asked my students to review the award-winning Idaho Public Television documentary on SARA and to peruse her website. Students first recognized, particularly in her paintings, certain distinctively modern formal qualities: the significance of color, abstraction, and flattened perspective. It was evident in, for example, Carmelia, that color selection depended not on observation but instead on the “non-optical,” like intuition, feeling, or idea. As SARA herself states, “I am not so interested about what is in front of the eyes as I am about what is behind the eyes.” This approach to color and representation is a hallmark development of the modern art period. As significantly, when coupled with her flat, simplified forms, the work is consciously attending to the medium of painting, to the act of painting, and to the thing it produces—a painting. In other words, it chooses itself as the subject rather than an illusionistic representation of something or somewhere else. In this way, much of modern art and SARA’s work— while wildly colorful, abstract, and unlike the observed world—is deeply concerned with reality as it is in the moment of real relation between artist and medium, artist and process, artist and subject. As Michelle Corriel points out in referring to SARA’s study of Paul Klee’s complex theories, “this color theory…includes the artist’s interaction with the real world.” This interaction is also signaled in her other mediums as well, for example, in the visible stitching on her half-body works. The evidence of the hand and the act of making is again on display, as the work itself. For example, one might call Marcella a bust, but it might be more accurate to say she sits. This is an effect of the process by which SARA made her, palpably weighted and sculpted through her invented “Eglomerate” wrapping method, the expressive outer stitching, and the stacked, circular buttons making her wide open eyes. Marcella and the other half bodies demand to be regarded not as representations but as utterly themselves. “[They] would NOT be ignored,” as her granddaughter Emma Shaffer so aptly described. My students had a similar response, the half bodies inspired at least one final creative project.
Marcella (Private Collection), Fabric Half Body
Students also recognized, in the way SARA approached her work and life, the modernist rejection of hierarchies, medium and otherwise. SARA’s fabric figures live on the same level with her paintings and with her ceramic work; they are in conversation with one another, as a body. It should come as no surprise, then, that all areas of life became locations for artmaking for SARA, including the sewing of clothes and the baking of bread: “The clay forms, the loaves of bread, the pillow forms, the tuffets, the busts, the dolls.” This expanded sense of what art could be and who might make it is a major theme in the story of modern art, a theme that continues in contemporary art making. For students who work in Idaho State University’s fiber department, this lands especially close to home. They include fiber work next to their paintings in their portfolios and walk the same Pocatello ground.
Erase the Pain and Suffering the Pattern of War, Oil on Canvas 18 x 54.25 x 1.75
Students were also drawn to SARA’s oil painting, Erase the Pain and Suffering the Pattern of War. In it we could see demonstrated an artist’s response to her sociopolitical context. The perennial relevance of a painting like Erase becomes clear after a semester spent considering the impact of the world wars on the lives and creative output of artists in the early 20th century. It is also unfortunately close to home in 2024 as we wrestle with the role of art in a time of increasing national and global conflict. SARA’s response— obscuring under layers of dark color and texture all except for the word ERASE—creates a painting that doubles as a gesture of precarious hope in the artistic and social process in the wake of the destruction of war.
Ultimately, however, we would not be acquainted with SARA’s work through formal qualities, medium, or social commentary alone. As implied above, their use is inextricably linked to her “dreamwork” and more generally to an engagement with the psyche, both personal and collective. One could say her dreams were simply material and she materialized them by making art. But the critical point to be made, and what makes SARA an excellent lens through which to examine the modernist period, is that absent her psychic explorations, her work would never have been made, at least not as the unique body it is. In this she joins other remarkable artists of the modern (and contemporary) period who influenced her, like Marc Chagall or Agnes Martin. This is not to say art is a secondary step or simple conduit on the way to an investigation of the mind.
To thread the needle a bit, for the artist it is always about art and the psyche is in simultaneity with it. Like her figure in the emblematic painting Night Sea Crossing, SARA’s work is greater than, say, an articulation of Jungian psychology, it is a product of the embodiment of the real ramifications of the unconscious life.
For my part, I found in SARA a kindred spirit. Like her, I forged a way midway through my life as a mother and intermedia artist, a circuitous route of multidisciplinary study taking advantage of resources and relationships at the College of Southern Idaho and Idaho State University. The experience opened my eyes to makers in the margins: the unsung artists, teachers, and appreciators whose efforts contributed not only to my artistic formation but more generally to cultural production in this part of the country. I am convinced these local conditions build tenacity, resourcefulness, and independence, attributes I also admire in SARA. In this way, I had been prepared to see her. So it was with deep pleasure to share her with my students and find them also prepared; her work was appreciable and applicable to them. The astonishment at discovering her— “she was here, on campus?”— contributed to a kind of rumbling under their feet, begging the question, is art history in the making, right here? I ask the same.
Iris Gray is an artist and adjunct professor at Idaho State University. Her work is an interplay of the allegorical and photographic, expanding both through multiple mediums and installation to imagine pasts, the present, and (im)possible futures. She makes her home in Pocatello, Idaho and enjoys walking among the sagebrush with loved ones and a camera.
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[1] Bill Caccia, Night Sea Crossing: Celebrating the Life and Art of Sara Joyce (Primedia eLaunch, LLC, 2023), 4.
[1] Michelle Corriel, “History: Dreams of Idaho,” Big Sky Journal Arts 2020, March 2020, https://bigskyjournal.com/history-dreams-of-idaho/
[1] Caccia, Night Sea Crossing, 16.
[1] Ibid., 18.