Shari Urquhart’s ‘Mustn’t Touch’ at Portrait Society and The Warehouse

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Image via Portrait Society Gallery

The current exhibition “Mustn’t Touch” graces the walls of two local venues—Portrait Society Gallery and the Warehouse—and spans five decades of Wisconsin-native, Shari Urquhart’s prolific career. It runs through June 25, and features four distinct bodies of work, each with unique narrative interests and strategies, united by obsessive textile-driven craft, complex subject matter, gender politics, and a curiously reflexive relationship to their creator and her 50-year odyssey through life and art.

The earliest works on view at Portrait Society feature large-scale rug-hooked scenes of stagey domestic interactions between men and women. Or, rather, a single man and a single woman locked in perplexing interaction. Bouncing Balls, a 6 x 7-foot work from 1979 depicts a woman on her back, foot-juggling colorful balls tossed by a standing male figure on the right. With its patterned, red-dot backdrop, it might be a stylized domestic snapshot, or even a surreal concoction…if the woman wasn’t staring outward, breaking the fourth wall with a plaintive woman-at-the-Folies Bergère gaze.

Urquhart’s decision-making—not to mention the size and painstaking fiber-by-fiber construction of each work—demands one to reckon with gender roles and power dynamics. The title of another work from this series, Hung Jury, sheds light on the odd interplay within the scene, between a man wearing only an apron and a high-stepping woman in a leotard. The woman seems poised at right to pounce toward the flinching male figure across the cluttered parlor; however, she’s caught in an awkward in-between stance, appearing to be tipping backward even while gesturing forward. It’s as if she sprung into an act of physical aggression only to recoil mid-pivot, leaving her figure in an awkward balance. And we the jury are left to consider the meaning and the outcome of the fraught stasis.

Her next body of work removed the male figure altogether, allowing her imagery to evolve further into an exploration of art historical characterizations of women. One of the most unique and inventive examples is Woman I, Stage II. The composition references Willem de Kooning’s iconic, semi-abstract Woman I; however, in contrast to de Kooning’s Woman, hers is naturalistic, refined, flattering, and sensual. And she’s armed with a flyswatter to fend off, as we learn from a quote drawn from the supporting wall text, a swarm of insect-men.

De Kooning’s is not a flattering portrait, all owl-eyed, shrill, and severe. But even if delicacy wasn’t his point, the work reminds us of the suffocating hyper-masculinity associated with the New York School, which surely off-gassed into Urquhart’s classrooms in the 1960s. This piece represents a clear repudiation of the patriarchal history of art she navigated throughout her career. And it may also offer further insights into her own personal history with men that are less overt in other works.

The examples from her art historical body at the Warehouse are gripping, complex, and visually irresistible. Included are brilliant reimaginations of Leonardo da Vinci’s Woman with Ermine, Caravaggio’s Medusa, and a feminist defacement of Rogier van der Weyden’s Francesco d’Este, complete with female gadflies harassing a male figure. Other historically inspired works are tissued together from multiple sources, personal, symbolic, mythological, and historical. The work Indecorous Reprisal for instance includes a sphinx, famous ballerinas, a nod to the obscure Belgian painter Fernand Khnopff, and a take on still-life painting from a feminist perspective. In their didactic abundance and narrative arrangements, this and several others in the same vein seem to nod to medieval textiles such as the Unicorn and Bayeux tapestries–objects of status and power guaranteed by the sheer amount of labor invested in them.  

Handmade, Loop-by-Loop

Given all the obvious discussion of content and suggestive meaning in this exhibition, it’s easy to overlook her mastery of craft and the seductiveness of the material. Save for a handful of very capable watercolors, the major works in “Mustn’t Touch” are all handmade, loop-by-loop using everything from fine silk thread to polyester fiber. There’s even some dog hair in a few. This variety gives their surfaces an iridescent shimmer and divisionist vitality rivaling the finest post-impressionist paintings. And like a Paul Cezanne or Berthe Morisot, Urquhart’s benefit from a pre-digital touch, one that eludes many contemporary artists who see the opportunity to lay color on a grid as a chance to exact photographic realism. Urquhart’s images on the other hand feel intuitively ‘drawn’ by the imperfectly perfect human imagination. 

Like so many fierce artistic visionaries from Monet to Manet to Matisse before her, Urquhart’s final body of work retreats into more reflective territory, turning to the subjects of flowers, gardens, and soil. The handful of wonderful floral examples in “Mustn’t Touch” were executed in Kenosha during the final years of her life after decades in New York. Taking in these more modest works of wool, mohair, silk, and acrylic in the rear of the Warehouse brought me full circle, all the way back to the personal and political fire that lit Shari Urquhart’s furnace and kept it burning incessantly for 50 years.

Fresh from Madison, Urquhart collided with a New York art scene in the 1970s in the heyday of floor-and-drawer conceptualism. Second-wave feminism was in full swing, but in the art world it was still taking many of its cues from a masculine, orthodox history. Read: Anna Chave, Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power. I can only imagine how a crafty, female, ‘Sconnie’ imagist was received Downtown. Still, Urquhart eventually cultivated personal and professional associations, with shows alongside artists as notable as Alison Saar, Keith Haring, and George Condo, but even as times and attitudes evolved, her work never answered to external voices. Instead, it barreled and looped ahead, through the fickle churnings of the art world machine. And inside the art world’s own engine room at that. And this makes the arc of her creative life a rare and delightful example to behold. Rarer now than ever—a unicorn.