Judith Blum Reddy is an American artist.
She lives and works in New York.
NARRATIVE STATEMENT
I attach ideas to form in my practice through acts of notation, transfer and drawing. I trained at Cooper Union in New York and Atelier 17 in Paris, coming of age as an artist in the 1970s between these two cities, during the heyday of conceptual art. I have a fascination with list-making, and often my works are undergirded with lists of names and things, places and events. I mine a panoply of sources, ranging from 1968 protest ephemera to reports on iPhone neighborhood watch apps, and the records of Nazi organized transport to concentration camps where members of my family were sent from Austria and perished in the 1940s. Through these notations, I engage with history and contemporary culture, with socio-economic questions and activist concerns. Drawing for me is an act of liberation, which I don’t see as radical, but as a way to process the absurd and the hopeful around me.
My work can be read as auto-portraiture, a visual diary or account of my everyday encounters, experiences, travels, interests and obsessions. My fellow artist Peter Nagy has described my work as a form of concrete poetry that, “combines the maniacal accounting of the bureaucrat with the incomprehensible babbling of the hysteric.” I acknowledge and embrace the sense of visual and textual abundance in my works, as I attempt to mobilize satire and excess in order to critique social systems. My subjects range from mappings of migrant life in Paris’ twenty arrondissements and an account of a notorious women’s prison in the city (now demolished) – both in collaboration with Nil Yalter – to a comprehensive, alphabetical list of railway stations across Europe, and the entries for all state institutions in the printed telephone directory of New Delhi. Extensive travels have inspired my interest in mapping and classification as well as modalities of bureaucratic organization and othering.
I have a long history of working very closely with African-American and Third World artists in New York – the former through my long association with Camille Billops and employment at the Hatch-Billops Archive where I transcribed and edited texts for their publications, and the latter through my late husband Krishna Reddy and my closest friend Zarina, both renowned printmakers and pedagogues from India who made NYC their home. In recent years, as one of the few artists remaining in a SoHo loft, I have been witness to the transformation of the neighborhood as well as of our national social and political landscape, themes that have inevitably entered my works in overt and subtle ways.
Judith Blum Reddy
The art of Judy Blum may have discovered its rational moorings in genres of creation we associate with New York in the 1970s (thinking precisely of the disciplines of Minimalism, Conceptualism and Process Art) but it may have found its raison d'être in the cultures (both ancient and contemporary) of India. Blum has a fascination with lists, usually lists of names, and the simple ordering of these lists supplies her with a program for making art. Drawing can be as simple as finding, composition can be relinquished to an indexical given. A type of concrete poetry is made visible while a paced litany renders language abstract, meditative or even comically onomatopoeic.
Judy Blum's art combines the maniacal accounting of the bureaucrat with the incomprehensible babblings of the hysteric. Order and chaos are mutual concerns while the comfort of repetition and the ease of simplicity mask a troubling irrationality. Judy Blum's purity of both form and intention posits a smooth sliding scale with which to measure the mundane as well as the uncanny. The artist's limitation of means complements a hysterical excess and is nothing less than a direct approach from which to go around in circles.
Peter Nagy
Judith Blum Reddy’s work (New York, United States, 1943) is rooted in her obsession for maps and lists. The sense of humor, the absurd and the self-critical are essential components of her oeuvre and intermix with a preoccupation about the future of humanity, structured by numeration and organization of different elements. Since the 1970s the idea of classification reoccurs in her practice and gives rise to a plethora of works, in which meticulousness is contrasted with the large-scale some of her installations can reach. Blum’s artworks, drawings of images and texts done in pencil, ball-point pen, ink, paint or even wax on diverse surfaces, contain a myriad of details, some of which are taken out of real life and others out of her imagination. Through the process of repetition, she intends to combat contemporary disorder. Blum is a tireless voyager with a perspicacious genius that is mirrored in her practice. Indian and French influences can be found in her work, both places she lived in for periods of her life, and throughout her career she has developed a captive narrative with which she echoes outrageous and shocking quotidian practices and ways of life.
The eclectic formal and conceptual components of Blum’s work make it difficult to assign them a specific artistic movement. Some of her works take an ironic approach to the absurdities of contemporary life, others question the discrimination between nations, and others invent names, time schedules and phone numbers. Even though each work speaks individually, all part from her personal experience and end up relating to each other. With her work she gives visibility to the fragility of democratic institutions and the inefficiency of the bureaucratic system emblematic of today’s societies, leaving her scrutiny of these institutions, which in many cases are insufficient in combating problems such as poverty and the inequality of women, out in the open. To abate this chaos Blum makes use of repetition and the simplicity of lists, which she incorporates between the written word and visual expressions. She overlays calligraphic images, introduces different scales, dimensions and temporalities and takes elements from sources as heterogeneous as comic books and topography, among many others. All of this gives her works an innocence behind which references to cultures, particular ways of life and specific historic events are hidden.
Her work is a reflection of the connections she has established throughout her life with the cultures of the countries she has lived in. In the early 1970s she moved to Paris, where she worked and collaborated with other female artists in documenting racism, sexism and inequality among social classes. Together they analyzed the everyday life of the French population and the reality of the city through drawings, photos, videos and unconventional narratives. In works such as Paris Ville Lumière (1974), done alongside the artist Nil Yalter, the history of 1970s Paris is told in twenty panels, one for each district. The result is a visual and textual coverage of the transformational and revitalizing period, in which Paris moved from being an antiquated and crowded city to being one of the great, global capitals of the 20th century. Yalter, author of the images and half of the drawings, and Blum, in charge of the other half of the illustrations and the formal conception of the work, reflected on the history of the city by adopting an engaged, political and militant perspective, in addition to analyzing the role women played in society, her battles and places of exclusion. When Blum returned to the United States in the 1980s, she participated in an exhibition called Who is she?, in which she related her experience as a north-American artist in India -a country she was strongly connected to through her partner and artist Krishna Reddy- opposing it to the experience of native artists, often excluded from international museum and biennial exhibitions albeit having French, U.S. or British passports. In New York Blum spent two decades working at the Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archive of African-American Culture of Manhattan, transcribing interviews and creating lists of all that was lacking and missing from the documentation of visual African-American culture.
Judy Blum’s work has been shown at MoMA P.S.1 (New York), Bronx Museum of Arts (New York) and the Contemporary Art Museum of Los Angeles, among others, and is represented in their collections as well as in the ones of the Fond National d’Art Contemporain (FNAC), the Cleveland Museum of Art and a variety of privet collections. Recently her work was exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), the Villa Vassilieff (Paris), the African Contemporary Art Biennial in 2016, FIAC Paris in 2016, the Gwangju Biennial in 2016, the Stedelijk Museum Bureau (Amsterdam), Station Independent Project (New York) and Art Dubai in 2015. Aside from curating a variety of shows in New York her work has been reviewed in prestigious magazines such as Art Forum, Frieze, The New York Times, Blouin Artinfo, Le Monde, Hindustan Times, NY Arts y Bronx Press Review, and she was the recipient of NYSCA CAPS Grant for Drawing and Graphics.