Emily Eveleth 2021

EMILY EVELETH

EMILY EVELETH

EMILY EVELETH

By Jackson Arn

If Susan Sontag had been a painter instead of a writer—if she’d had the same tastes and ideas but worked them into pictures rather than words—she might have painted like Emily Eveleth. For those who care to look, Eveleth’s images are full of Sontagian morsels: Camp, the leveling of meaning, and (especially) the erotics of art. There’s more than a little Sontag, too, in the way the form fits, and doesn’t fit, the content— the refined style wrapped around a faint, yet persistent, naughtiness.

That, at least, is one way of describing Eveleth’s paintings. A simpler one is that Emily Eveleth paints donuts. Glazed, powdered, cream- or jelly-filled; sometimes one at a time, sometimes stacked or side-by-side; nearly all purchased from local establishments in Massachusetts, Eveleth’s longtime home (not to mention one of the great pastry Meccas of the United States).

Donuts have kept her busy for nearly thirty years. To put that number in perspective, Claude Monet painted and repainted the Rouen Cathedral for about three years, and Andy Warhol burned out on cans of Campbell’s Soup in less than one.

The Campbell’s comparison is especially instructive. Like Warhol, Eveleth paints cheap, unglamorous, American food. Unlike Warhol, Eveleth can actually—how to put this?—paint. Educated at Smith College and the Massachusetts College of Art, proudly indebted to Caravaggio and Francisco de Zurbarán, she goes about her business as if rumors of the End of Art have been greatly exaggerated. Whatever her images are, they’re assuredly not Pop Art. Warhol sees his subject through layers of irony that he never escapes (nor seems to want to escape); the result, at least to my mind, is a huddle of mumbly, adolescent images that trail off just as they’re starting to say something interesting. There’s a healthy amount of irony in Eveleth’s donut paintings, too, but she’s too jazzed on the technical and psychological possibilities of her subject to settle for irony. Her new canvases are medium-sized, neither monumental nor precious—donut portraits, you might say. If you study them together, you may

have the intuition that this is the size donuts really are; by making them larger than life, paradoxically, Eveleth has made them life-sized, as in alive and breathing—not dough and jelly but flesh and blood.

I’ve beaten around the bush long enough—Eveleth’s donut paintings are absurdly, unmissably, heart-racingly sexual. It’s not just that she makes fried dough look fleshy; there are times when her brushstrokes are so silky and her cropping so extreme that you forget that what you’re looking at is supposed to be anything but flesh. And she’s fond of pricking flesh-dough with slimy red orifices that seem, like the genitalia in Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, to pull the rest of the composition into their orbit. There are pert, symmetrical, smutty donuts (Odyssey), and flabby orgies of donuts pressing themselves into pancakes (The Organization, The Bedroom Philosophers), and donut couples glaze-glued together (Innocence).

One of the many delights of Eveleth’s oeuvre is the vast number of ways she has found to look at her subject, so that a humble dessert takes on as many expressive

poses as a nude model in a figure drawing class, or the nude lovers in the pages of the Kama Sutra.

Everything is about sex, the joke goes, except sex, which is about power. I’m reminded of this when I look at Eveleth’s work: Sex is always there, to be sure, but just out of view, and the more explicitly it’s suggested the more it comes to seem like a cipher for something else. At a glance, The Watcher and the Watched, a particularly in-yourface Courbet homage, might look more like pornography than erotic art, but that pornographic literalism creates its own peculiar set of metaphors. The incontinent hole leaking thick, dark fluid, suggests any number of out-there associations: the origin of the world and its end, a wound, a mouth, and even—thanks in part to the title—an eye.

Eveleth has lots of fun with her titles, all of which are based on books published by the legendarily taboo-breaking Olympia Press, among them the Marquis de Sade’s The Bedroom Philosophers. Her titles may be clues, or winks, or red herrings, or a bit

of all three. The de Sade allusion emphasizes a bawdy streak that was already baldly apparent in the painting; in other cases, however, the words hold sex at an ironic genteel distance. (I can’t read the words, The Quintessence of Debauchery, without picturing Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell clutching her pearls.) Other titles tut-tut us for sniffing out the sex that Eveleth plainly wants us to sniff. A painting called Innocence, which shows sugary pink juices running sweatily down a donut’s underside, may be plenty of things, but innocent is not one of them.

Entire books could be written about this painter’s use of pink—pink, the color of raw muscle and pale skin vexed to a blush, but also of plastic lawn flamingos and Valentine’s Day schmaltz. Eveleth knows how to have it both ways. In Pleasures and Follies of a Good Natured Libertine, one kind of pink curdles into the other; what’s sensual and intimate grows tacky and lukewarm, with a strong chemical odor. But one pink doesn’t triumph over the other any more than folly triumphs over pleasure; each holds the other steady, creating a host of associations that haunt you well after you’ve looked away. And Eveleth does more with black and white than most painters can do with the entire rainbow. Curtain features a stack of donuts leaking (or is it bleeding?) jelly against an inky black backdrop, but the lower-right corner is a bright, almost overexposed-looking white—a nod to the street photography of Weegee, with his flashbulb ambushes of New Yorkers caught in mid-sin. All the new paintings are based on photographs, and it shows, not just in the glare of the light but in the confident, improvisational energy of the framing: In Curtain or Without Shame or The Quintessence of Debauchery, you feel the little aha of catching someone in the middle of something, like a gossip-rag paparazzo craning through a crack in the bedroom door.

I’m going in circles: Eveleth’s paintings are about sex, but then again they’re not, but then again they are, in the sense that they’re about everything. With repetition, the beauty of her fast-food still lifes becomes a kind of sensuality, which grows into outright sexuality before veering off into disgust or loneliness or violence. None of this would be possible without Eveleth’s technical mastery, her ability to say one thing with a brushstroke even as its thickness and color and opacity say half a dozen others. In Boudoir, she uses a wax medium to give the canvas a powdery glow and make the donut seem supernatural, almost gravity-defying—a parody of, but also an homage

to, the hyperbole of food advertising. Elsewhere (the foreground of Odyssey is a prime example), she paints smooth, glowing glazes and jellies, but in rough, cracked, dirty strokes that become more menacing the longer you stare at them. Plenty of artists have painted food that looks good enough to eat; plenty of others have painted food that looks rotten or sickly. Here, too, Eveleth’s trick is to have it both ways: to evoke, in the same image, the bright, lush, all-American lawn from the opening scene of Blue Velvet as well as the gnashing insects hiding beneath it.

“The flight from interpretation,” Sontag wrote, “seems particularly a feature of modern painting.” That was in 1964. Too many recent paintings, or so I’ve felt lately, wear their interpretations—much like their “politics”—with pride. Eveleth is doing something more difficult. Incapable of choir-preaching or gimmick-shilling, she has found a subject that flits hummingbird-like between many meanings without resting for too long on any single one. More generally, her work is a celebration of things that are sometimes presumed to be in decline: elegant oil-on-canvas still lifes; eroticism that comes in carefully measured drips instead of gallons; art that isn’t explicitly, thuddingly about The Way We Live Now (and therefore has a good shot at surviving well after we move on). All of which is to say, these donuts are built to last.

26 x 18 inches

66 x 45.7 cm

26 x 18 inches

66 x 45.7 cm

26 x 18 inches

66 x 45.7 cm

The Bedroom Philosophers, 2021

The Organization, 2020

26 x 18 inches

66 x 45.7 cm

26 x 18 inches

66 x 45.7 cm

26 x 18 inches

66 x 45.7 cm

EMILY EVELETH

Born in Hartford, CT in 1960

Lives and works in Sherborn, MA

EDUCATION

1987

MFA, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA

1983

BA, Smith College, Northampton, MA

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2021

Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

“Future Possessive: Emily Eveleth,” Zillman Museum of Art at the University of Maine, Bangor, ME

2019

“Results of Interpretation,” The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA

2018

“Past Imperfect,” Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston, MA

2016

“Emily Eveleth, New Paintings - Degrees of Artifice,” Danese/Corey, New York, NY

“Art on the Marquee” (with Amy Baxter MacDonald), Boston Convention Center, Boston, MA

2014

“Future Tense,” Miller/Yezerski Gallery, Boston, MA

“Perspective,” Carroll House Gallery, Keene State College, Keene, NH

2012

“Emily Eveleth: New Paintings - Golden Age,” Danese, New York, NY

2010

“Luscious: Paintings by Emily Eveleth,” Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA

“Better Not Tell You Now,” Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston, MA

2008

“Emily Eveleth: New Paintings - Full Circle,” Danese, New York NY

2006

“Emily Eveleth – It’s All True,” Danese, New York, NY

2004

“Emily Eveleth: Recent Paintings,” Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston, MA

2003

“Emily Eveleth: Paintings and Drawings,” Danese, New York, NY

2002

“Emily Eveleth: Paintings,” Reynolds Gallery, Richmond, VA

“So Long Ago I Can’t Remember;” Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston, MA

2001

“Emily Eveleth: New Paintings,” Danese, New York, NY

2000

“Emily Eveleth: Small Paintings,” Hidell Brooks Gallery, Charlotte, NC

1999

“Emily Eveleth New Paintings,” Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston, MA

“Emily Eveleth New Paintings and Drawings,” Danese, New York, NY

1998

Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston, MA

1997

“Emily Eveleth, A Painter Selects,” The Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA

1996

Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston, MA

Allan Stone Gallery, New York, NY

1995

“NoBIAS,” Bennington, VT

Akus Gallery, Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimantic, CT

1994

Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston, MA

1990

Harcus Gallery, Boston, MA

1988

Harcus Gallery, Boston, MA

1986

Harcus Gallery, Boston, MA

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2021

“Birds of the Northeast: Gulls to Great Auks,” Fairfield

University Art Museum, Fairfield, CT

“Beginning: The Inaugural Exhibition,” Carol Corey Fine Art, Kent, CT

“Garden Party,” Carol Corey Fine Art, Kent, CT

2020

“A La Carte: A Visual Exploration of our Relationship with Food,” Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, The University of Alabama, Birmingham, AL

2019

“Kith and Kin,” Lesley University, Cambridge, MA

“Off the Menu,” Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek, CA

“Like Sugar,” Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY

2018

“Capita,” Danese/Corey, New York, NY

2017

“We Dream/Beauty Beyound and Beneath” (curated by Deborah Davidson), Suffolk University Gallery, Boston, MA

2016

“Drawing Conclusions,” Danese/Corey, New York, NY

“Fertile Solitude” (curated by Elizabeth Devlin), Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA

“Feast,” Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, NY

“Luscious,” Brattleboro Museum of Art, Brattleboro, VT

2015

“Dynamic Conversations” (curated by Chris Rifkin), South Shore Art Center, Cohasset, MA

“Confections,” Allan Stone Projects, New York, NY

“Gaining Perspective: A Visual History of MassART,” Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA

2014

“Food For Thought,” Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC

“Painting Intricacies,” Nave Gallery Annex, Somerville, MA

2013

“Still Life Lives,” Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, MA

“The Linda Lee Alter Collection of Art by Women,” Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA

2011

“Works On Paper II,” Danese, New York, NY

“Feast,” Lemberg Gallery, Ferndale, MI

“In the Presence of Light,” Danese, New York, NY

“Naked,” Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston, MA

“Poetical Fire,” Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE

2010

“Sweetness and Light,” Hampden Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA

“Works on Paper,” Danese, New York, NY

2009

“I Want Candy: The Sweet Stuff in American Art,” Fresno Metropolitan Musuem, Fresno, CA, traveled to Nicolaysen Art Museum and Discovery Center, Casper, WY

“Drawing Itself,” Brattleboro Museum, Brattleboro, VT

2008

“Here’s the Thing: The Single Object Still Life” (curated by Robert Cottingham), Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY

2007

“All the More Real: Portrayals of Intimacy and Empathy” (curated by Eric Fischl and Merrill Falkenberg), Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY

“The Sweet Stuff in American Art,” The Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY

“Sugar Buzz,” Lehman College Art Gallery, New York, NY

“Loneliness and Melancholy” (curated by Pawel Wojtasik and Susan Classen-Sullivan), Hans Weiss Newspace Gallery, Manchester Community College, Manchester, NY

2006

“Transitional Objects: Contemporary Still Life,” Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York, NY

“The Hungry Eye,” Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York, NY

“Emily Eveleth and Jonathan Shahn: Paintings and Sculpture,” Saint-Gaudens, Cornish, NH

2005

“Unrehearsed Acts” (curated by Christine Darnell), Artspace, New Haven, CT

“Works on Paper,” Danese, New York, NY

“Head Count,” Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston, MA

2004

“Disturbing the Peace,” Danese, New York, NY

“Full Disclosure,” Geoffrey Young Gallery, Great Barrington, MA

“Sexy Sustenance,” Lillian Imming Gallery, Emmanuel College, Boston, MA

“Some of Their Parts,” Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston, MA

“Summer Show,” Danese, New York, NY

2003

“One Hundred Years of American Artists,” 40 Contemporary Artists, Rochefort-en-terre, France

“American Art,” Residence of the US Ambassador, Copenhagen, Denmark

“Sweet Tooth,” COPIA, Napa, CA

2002

“Painting in Boston: 1950 – 2000,” The DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA

“Drawings from the Grinnell College Collection,” The Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA

“177th Annual: Invitational Exhibition,” National Academy of Design Museum, New York, NY

2001

“Group Exhibition,” Lemberg Gallery, Ferndale, MI

“Private Thoughts: Personal Demons,” The Klemm Gallery at Siena Heights University, Adrian, MI

2000

“DeCordova Downtown,” The Federal Reserve Gallery, Boston, MA

“Face Off,” Fuller Museum of Art, Brockton, MA

“Eloquent Objects: The Sense and Sensibilities of Still-Life Painting,” Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME

“Landscape at the Millennium,” Chapel Art Center, Saint Anselm College, Manchester, NH

“Figure, Fantasy & Illusion,” Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA

“New Realism for a New Millennium,” The Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY

1999

“Best of the Season: Selected Work from the 1998–1999 Gallery Season,” The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT

“Food for Thought,” New Jersey Center for Contemporary Art, Summit, NJ and Hidell Brooks Gallery, Charlotte, NC

1998

“Talent,” Allan Stone Gallery, New York, NY

“Notions of Color: Oil Sketching in Maine, Bates College Museum of Art,” Lewiston, ME

“Cornucopia,” Winston Wächter Fine Art, New York, NY

“Food For Thought,” DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY

“Gallery Group,” Allan Stone Gallery, New York, NY

1997

“Making a Still-Life: Ten Variations,” The South Shore Art Center, Cohasset, MA

1996

“Posing Reality,” University Gallery, Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA

“Contemporary Still Life,” Chapel Art Center, St. Anselm’s College, Manchester, NH

“Contemporary Landscapes,” Virginia Lynch Gallery, Tiverton, RI

“Northern Voices: The No-Brow Traveling Medicine Show,” Christine Price Gallery, Castleton State College, Castleton, VT

1995

“Four American Painters,” Musee du Chateau de Rochefort-en-Terre, Rochefort-en-Terre, France

“Talent,” Allan Stone Gallery, New York, NY

“Still Life,” Virginia Lynch Gallery, Tiverton, RI

“Northern Voices: The No-Brow Traveling Medicine Show,” AS220, Providence, RI

“Art for All Seasons,” Massachusetts Audubon’s Broadmore Wildlife Sanctuary, South Natick, MA

1994

“1994 Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture” (curated by Klaus Kertess), The Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, MA

“Gallery Group,” Allan Stone Gallery, New York, NY

“Palate/Palette,” Starr Gallery, Newton, MA

“Art for All Seasons,” Massachusetts Audubon’s Broadmore Wildlife Sanctuary, South Natick, MA

“Group Show,” Gleason Fine Art, Boothbay Harbor, ME

1993

“Altered Reality,” Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston, MA

“Seventh Triennial Exhibition,” Fuller Museum of Art, Brockton, MA

“Group Show,” Barbara Scott Gallery, Miami, FL

“Seeing the Object,” Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA

1992

“Reality as Metaphor,” Danforth Museum, Framingham, MA

“Gallery Group,” Allan Stone Gallery, New York, NY

“New England/New Talent,” Fitchburg Museum of Art, Fitchburg, MA

“Woman in the Visual Arts,” Erector Square Gallery, New Haven, CT

“New Art ‘92,” Kingston Gallery, Boston, MA

1991

“Boston Through the Years,” Harcus Gallery, Boston, MA

1990

“New at the Art Guild,” Farmington, CT

1988

“The Factory, A Reconsideration,” Laura Knott Gallery, Bradford College, Bradford, MA

1987

“Enduring Visions,” The Copley Society, Boston, MA

“Interior Spaces,” The Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA

“Working Women,” The Harcus Gallery, Boston, MA

1986

“Nature Observed,” The Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA

1985

“Small Works U.S.A.,” Gallery 401, Providence, RI

“Games People Play,” Faneuil Gallery, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA

1984

“Summer Show,” The Red Barn Gallery, Fisher’s Island, NY

1983

“Two Woman Show,” Smith College, Northampton, MA

LECTURES AND VISITING ARTIST ENGAGEMENTS

2016

School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA

Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA

Farnsworth Museum of Art, Rockland, ME

2015

On Beauty, Emily Eveleth and David Tester: A Catalyst Conversation Lecture at the Broad Institute, Cambridge MA

Suffolk University, Boston, MA

2013

Lesley University, Masters of Fine Arts program, Boston, MA

Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta, GA

2010

Visiting Artist, Beloit College, Beloit, WI

AWARDS

2002

Visiting Artist, American Academy in Rome, Rome, Italy

1996

French Government Grant, Artist Residency Program, Rochefort-en-Terre, France

1995

Art Matters Inc. Fellowship, New York, NY

1994

National Endowment for the Arts/New England Foundation for the Arts, Fellowship Award in Painting, Boston, MA

1992

Show Award, New Art ‘92, Kingston Gallery, Boston, MA

Merit Award, Women in the Visual Arts, Erector Square Gallery, New Haven, CT

1989

Massachusetts Artists Fellowship Program, Finalist in Painting, Boston, MA

1986

Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Painting and Printmaking Department Achievement Award, Boston, MA

SELECT COLLECTIONS

The Boston Public Library, Boston, MA

Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimantic, CT

Fairfield University Art Museum, Fairfield, CT

Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

The New England, Boston, MA

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA

The Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE

Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

EMILY EVELETH

21 October – 27 November 2021

Miles McEnery Gallery

520 West 21st Street

New York NY 10011

tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

Publication © 2021 Miles McEnery Gallery

All rights reserved Essay © 2021 Jackson Arn

Director of Publications

Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY

Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Damianos Photography, Framingham, MA

Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA

Catalogue designed by McCall Associates, New York, NY

ISBN: 978-1-949327-58-8

Cover: Boudoir, (detail), 2021