Artist Joe Zucker: An Appreciation

Joe Zucker’s death on May 15, six days before his 83rd birthday, left an enormous void in the art world and marked an important moment in the timeline of American art history. In his own appreciation of Joe in “Hyperallergic,” art critic John Yau headlined Joe’s “rebellious spirit.” And Joe was a rebel in terms of his art-making, by taking risks, following his own path, and developing an approach that was identifiably unique to himself alone.

Joe developed deep and long-lasting friendships with his creative cohorts who came of age artistically in the mid-1960s by forging their own paths and pushing the boundaries of their Abstract Expressionist, Pop and Minimal forebears. Along with Joe, artists such as Chuck Close, Barry Le Va, Jennifer Bartlett, Dorothea Rockburne, Brice Marden and others exhibited at the ground-breaking Bykert Gallery, empowered and emboldened by curator Klaus Kertess’s leadership during its 11 groundbreaking years (1966-1975). The gallery played a significant role in launching the careers of artists who embraced new ways of art-making both materially and conceptually and who are now cornerstones of art history,

Joe often talked about what he called his blue-collar, proletarian approach to the process of painting, and within the context of the physical nature of “making,” this might be true. But I challenge this as in any way fully understanding what Joe was up to in his work. In every one of the 80 series of artworks he created, there was a conceptual underpinning based on research, evaluation and interpretation. Often in viewing contemporary art, people ask themselves, “What is the meaning of this?” It was not always immediately evident in looking at Joe’s paintings and drawings, but meaning was emphatically the foundation for Joe’s inquiries.

His 2015 exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum, “Life & Times of an Orb Weaver” organized by then-chief curator Alicia Longwell, was a classic example of Joe’s ability to couple intellectual exercises with material exploration. This series was anchored by six square paintings of abstract spider webs constructed using sash cord attached in layers of acrylic gel, making for an atmosphere that was the color and viscosity of honey — a decidedly mixed nature metaphor. These works were accompanied by a compilation of prints from 1991 titled “Spider Chronicles,” which juxtaposed drawings of various spiders with texts that chronicled his encounters with spiders in his travels, sometimes ominous, sometimes humorous. Whether inspired by arachnophobia or focusing on spiders as industrious and inventive in their pursuit of food, Joe’s compendium of images was compellingly thought-provoking.

Chuck Close once told me that “problem-solving is overrated. It’s problem creation that pushes one into creative boundary breaking.” And Joe’s approach to identifying and wrestling to the ground any number of materials and techniques that were broadly outside the traditions of painting on canvas has been a hallmark of his decades-long career. His visual vocabulary was gargantuan. In his studio over the course of the 15 years I had the pleasure of knowing him, I was constantly surprised by his ingenuity. My first visit in 2010 introduced me to a remarkable series of works called “Empire Descending a Staircase,” a rigorous inquisition on the grid, which consisted of 22 monochromatic works created by removing the top paper layer of common construction drywall, scoring and painting intricate grid patterns with delicately transparent watercolors to create a haptic surface that was equal parts geometry and rich sensuality that was visually and intellectually mesmerizing.

On a later visit I had the opportunity to see him transform common floor mops into something that combined a very dry wit with another serious exploration of the modernist, minimal grid. Arranged along and across the studio walls were 250 open squares constructed from 1,000 mops, their string heads soaked in bright paint, bolted together to create modules that functioned as surrogate painted canvases. The project was a stunning tour de force act of painting.

In the Parrish collection was a painting I loved, Joe’s “Aquarium,” a bright, highly colorful and pointillistic picture of fish in an aquarium, created from cotton balls soaked in acrylic paint and Rhoplex. The colors, the texture, and the subject never ceased to engage visitors to the museum. I thought it was genius to use these everyday materials so effectively in pictorially narrative artwork. The 2010 presentation of “Tales of Cotton” at the Mary Boone Gallery, organized by Klaus Kertess, was revelatory. Brought together again for the first time since being exhibited at Bykert Gallery and the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1976, these large-scale canvases were a crystalline expression of how Joe could reinvent common everyday items into a unification of material form and content capable of expressing his vision of history and contemporary life. These beautiful and powerful paintings define Joe’s artistic legacy. In this series, the narrative brutality of his subject matter unfolds slowly. By using the cotton balls as his painterly medium, Joe created pictorial representations infused with allusions to America’s darkest history of slavery and the cotton trade. In his 2010 review of the exhibition “High Cotton” critic Charlie Finch noted that Joe’s intent was to turn “repugnance into beauty.” He succeeded.

Joe’s exhibition history encompasses galleries and museums throughout the country and internationally, starting with exhibitions at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1960 and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1965 when he was still an art student, and continuing throughout his 60-year career. His work is included in every major art museum in the country. A comprehensive monograph covering almost his entire career was published by Thames & Hudson in January 2019, with essays by John Elderfield, chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, independent curator Terry Myers, Phong Bui and Alex Bacon. With 256 pages and 245 images, the book amply illustrates how prolific and ingenious Joe was as an artist.

Aside from embodying artist Bruce Nauman’s assertion that “the true artist is an amazing fountain,” Joe was warm, funny and forthright, and just as enthusiastic and engaged outside the studio as within. He was revered as a volunteer coach for the Bridgehampton High School basketball team “The Killer Bees” (a follow-up to his early college years on the courts himself), his dedication to the team illustrated in Orson and Ben Cummings’s 2017 documentary “Killer Bees.”

He loved fishing in Montauk and traveled regularly to Tofte, Minnesota, on the shores of Lake Superior for extended three-month fishing trips every year for decades. He developed close fishing-buddy relationships with friends and neighbors in and around East Hampton, where he lived with his wife, Britta Le Va. When the couple decided to permanently leave the city in 1982, after looking at dozens of properties in search of the perfect live-work situation, they decided to construct their own purpose-built home/studio combination with the studio on one side and their living on the other separated by a glass atrium. All this was nestled in the pine forest where he planted 250 trees. Some of my fondest memories of Joe and Britta are there: a studio visit followed by cocktails and dinner. Christmas celebrations were overseen by a pine Christmas tree taken straight from the property, sparsely decorated with handmade ornaments — one year they were all made by the students from the Killer Bees basketball team.

Joe’s art touched and changed the lives of countless people, and his legacy in the pantheon of American art history is secure. He was a great friend and colleague to me, and to many others, and he will be missed.

Terrie Sultan is founding director of Art Museum Strategies, an independent curator, writer, and cultural consultant. She was director of the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill from 2008 to 2020.