Judith Stone
Boston, United States
0 Works exhibited on Kooness
Current location
Virginia
Represented by
Works by Judith Stone
Judith Stone: Born in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., Judith Stone lived her youth in Great Neck, Long Island, a small town near New York City. Her parents had a passionate interest in all kinds of artistic manifestations - theatre, music, dance, visual arts - which led them to make weekly trips to Manhattan where they were able to take full advantage of the cultural riches of the bustling Mecca. Also intellectually nourished by her parents' overflowing bookshelves, Stone attended Vassar College, where she graduated cum laude in English and French literature. She then continued her studies with a Master's degree at Harvard University, majoring in French language and literature, thinking at the time to pursue a career in literary criticism and teaching. However, six years later, increasingly aware of her artistic inclination Stone shifted to the visual arts, devoting herself to art design and becoming the focus of her professional activity for almost four decades now. The artist thus obtained a second Master's degree in painting and printmaking at Boulder, University of Colorado, which allowed her to structure and intensify her affinity with graphite drawing, (now more accurately called "mixed media on paper") which has always been the soul and heart of her oeuvre. It is also noteworthy that in addition to being fully engaged in artistic creation in her atelier Stone has never and for no reason abandoned the study of literature, a discipline that has characterised her university years, both in her three-year degree and part of her master's degree. Assiduously attending academic departments, for 35 years Stone has lectured and given seminars on English and American literature, design, art and architectural history at various university campuses in Denver, Philadelphia, Burlington, Vermont and Tokyo. Like his professional life, his travel experiences have been similarly eclectic. He lived in Paris, Accra, Ghana and Tokyo, for about a year in each, and travelled to the British Isles, Eastern and Western Europe, Japan and Israel. Equally central to the creation of his images are his numerous trips to the United States of America, thanks to which he became more familiar with the vastness and variety of topography but also with the cultural environments that characterise his homeland. It is precisely the breadth of observation obtained thanks to his many travels enriched with an almost obsessive interpretative reading that provides the starting material for the creation of his works. Stone's works on paper can be found in public and private collections in the United States and Japan, such as in the University City Science Center in Philadelphia, the University of New Hampshire Museum in Durham and the Frederick Harris Studios in Tokyo. It is also included in Marquis' 'Who's Who in American Art' and 'Who's Who in American Women'.
SOLO EXHIBITIONS: Castleton University Downtown Gallery, See Feelingly: Weigh and Balance, Rutland, VT, 2015 - Caelum Gallery, Constructing Constructions, New York, NY, 2009 - Yester House Galleries, Southern Vermont Art Center, Judith Stone: New Work Manchester, VT, 2007 - Espace 234, Cordes et Noeuds (Ropes and Knots), Montreal, Quebec, 2002 - Caelum Gallery, About Surface, New York, NY, 2001 - Lancaster Museum of Art, Judith Stone: Work on Paper, Lancaster, PA, 1996 - St. Joseph s University Art Gallery, Commemorative Exhibition, Philadelphia, PA, 1996 - Thomas Moser Cabinetmaker, Judith Stone: New Work, Philadelphia, PA, 1989 - Esther Klein Gallery, University City Science Center, Philadelphia, PA, Judith Stone: Work on Paper, 1989 - Hinoki Gallery, Judith Stone: Drawings, Tokyo, Japan, 1987 - Grimaldis Gallery, Judith Stone: Drawings, Baltimore, MD, 1985 - St. Joseph s University Art Gallery, Lift, Drag, Thrust, Philadelphia, PA, 1984 - University City Science Center Gallery, Judith Stone: Work on Paper, Philadelphia, PA, 1981 - Erik Makler Gallery, From Photographs, Philadelphia, PA, 1979
GROUP EXHIBITIONS: Helen Day Art Center, The Traveling Artist, Stowe, VT, 2007 - Thorne Sagendorf Art Gallery, Keene State College, Keene, NH, & Museum of Art, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, MacDowell Colony Centennial Exhibit: In Residence: Artists and the MacDowell Colony Experience, 2007 - West Branch Gallery and Sculpture Park, Three Fridays in May, Stowe, VT, 2007 - New Art Center, Reveal, Newton, MA, 2006 - Yester House Galleries, Southern Vermont Art Center, Art on Campus, Manchester, VT, 2002 - Pennsylvania State University, The Urban Landscape, Harrisburg, PA, 1998 - Nexus Gallery, Concrete Poetry, Philadelphia, PA, 1997 - Philadelphia Museum of Art, John Cage Retrospective, Rolyholyover: A Circus, Philadelphia, PA, 1995 - Goldie Paley Design Center, Drawings: Process and Product, Philadelphia University, Philadelphia, PA, 1985 - Goldie Paley Design Center, Look at Drawings, Philadelphia University, Philadelphia, PA, 1981 - University of Colorado Art Galleries, The Artist and the Master Printer, Boulder, CO, 1979 - Marion Locks Gallery, Looking Forward, Philadelphia, PA, 1980 - Sebastian Moore Gallery, Strains of Realism, Denver, CO, 1979 - University of Colorado Art Galleries, Boulder Cross Section, University of Colorado at Fort Collins, Fort Collins, CO, 1978 - Boulder Fine Arts Center, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, Boulder, CO, 1978
WORKS ON PAPER BY JUDITH STONE: Most of Judith Stone's works on paper are characterised by a persistent fascination with the phases of life and transition of a built environment. During the early years of her career, the artist focused her efforts precisely on architectural forms; in more recent years, she has instead aimed to scrutinise the movements of light on the machinery that enables the construction of buildings but also their more dramatic counterpart, their demolition. Stone succeeds in doing this, even though he has not fully fathomed the origin of his love affair with construction canters and the machinery handled within them, but he can affirm that the movements of the shovels, telescopic boom trucks and bulldozers are all at times explosive and powerful but also delicate and precise, representing in this way the principles of the masculine and feminine of the mechanical world as we can understand them in our human world.
A small part of Stone's oeuvre shows a shift towards a central motif in contrast to the weight, relative rigidity and implicit danger of earthmoving equipment. It depicts, in fact, ropes in length, entwining and twisting, stretching and curving, and sometimes resulting in knots. Flexible and immediately in tension, a modest length of rope can lift heavy objects, suspend them in mid-air and gradually let them go, a staggering feat achieved with what can seem at a distance, a line in space. Stone perceives the rope with a vital connotation as, considering its nature, we can immediately conceive of it as the fundamental connector, the umbilical cord, yet provided in contrast, with a much more threatening incarnation, the noose.
The main technique used by Stone is graphite powder; his only point of departure, however, photography... which has always been his. The black-and-white drawings, as well as the rendering elements that dominate the mixed-media works, are delineated from photographs of sites that she herself has frequently traversed, so frequently in fact, that their constituent parts have been internalised to such an extent that they have become constants in her own mental geography. On the other hand, in terms of technique and compositional structure, Stone acknowledges the impact on her of the year she spent in Tokyo where she was exposed to Japanese art and design norms, taught, travelled and worked in her studio in Matsubara (1986-1987). As far as technique is concerned, she echoes Japanese ink (sumi-é) and its fluid quality. By painting with trails of graphite powder, she manages to loosen the more disciplined textures, tones and edges that have long characterised her drawing. For composition, on the other hand, the Japanese predilection for asymmetry and diagonal movement validates his instinct for design, as can be seen in his most current works.
Since 1992, specifically during her art residency at the MacDowell Colony, Stone has been directly incorporating photographs with the foundational surface in renderings. In her studio at MacDowell, she took the thoughtful and long-considered risk of igniting a completed drawing by creating a hole and placing a photographic image, whole or fragmented, beneath this resulting 'window'. Altered in colour, but not in shape or detail, by a tinted but transparent Plexiglas panel, the photograph offers us a second level of visual experience, evoking the cinematic flashback. More recently, transparent and coloured Plexiglass boxes have replaced the panels. Together with photographs of the American West, Japan or Israel embedded inside, the boxes, mounted on the picture plane, give Stone's works a more sculptural dimension. Crucially and critically important to fully appreciate the artist's motivations, the photographs evoke his deepest and most intense memories.
AWARDS:
Marquis Who’s Who of American Women, 2004 - 2016 - Marquis Who’s Who in American Art, 2005 - 2017, Anniversary Edition 2011 - MacDowell Colony Resident Fellow, 1992