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Donelle Woolford
Geboren 1977, Conyers, Georgia (VS)
Woont en werkt in New York City, New York (VS)
Biografie
Donelle Woolford is an African American woman artist of the 21st century. Her medium is wood. Working alone in the remote corner of a lumber reclamation factory in the shadows of a faded industrial town, she rekindles past glories by reconstructing them from memory. Her assemblage paintings, Cubist in spirit, are intentionally made to coincide with and challenge the centennial anniversary of that movement.
From close inspection, Donelle Woolford’s work seems to be postmodernism wrapped in identity politics filtered through memory and personal experience. The question is, on which memories are her reconstructions based? African art? Postmodernism? A manufacturing-based economy? Cubism? When images just come to you, when they just well up out of the debris under your feet as if by instinct, where do they come from? Is Donelle Woolford, having been made aware of the twentieth century’s dominant aesthetic by various institutions of higher learning, merely regurgitating it on their behalf? Or is she reaching back, like a time machine, through Picasso and Braque to a more distant West African ancestry? And given the Postmodern theories of cultural origin and influence that are the basis of Identity politics, is that kind of dissimilation even possible?
As one investigates further, we come back to the beginning of the story: Donelle Woolford is a narrative by Joe Scanlan.
Over the past six years, Joe Scanlan has worked with Donelle Woolford as an alter ego for his Cubist paintings. Though lying passively in disguise for years, Donelle Woolford, a character spawned from an amalgam of myth, fact, aesthetics and economics, now rises from the page to become a real, walking, talking artist, the living embodiment of her work.
The essential question posed by Donelle Woolford or, to be more precise, Joe Scanlan is the willingness of the artist to be free, to be imaginative, to do whatever is necessary to construct the best narrative possible. If that narrative is compelling, and if its characters and ideas and material props are desirable, then the commodification of art and politics that ensues has the potential to change the dialogue between art and the consumers of art that is, between art and its audience. If one of the consequences of that potential, that change, is that one artist must recede into the background so that another can take center stage, then so be it. To quote Joe Scanlan: "I try not to let myself get in the way of a good idea."
Donelle Woolford, Narrative artist. Donelle Woolford, Cubist painter. Donelle Woolford, avatar. The possibilities are endless.
Born in 1977 in Conyers, Georgia. She is the second of three children to professional parents. Her mother is a natural healer and her father a lawyer
1986 Begins private schooling. She is a bit of a loner, the silent type, but she loves reading and making things with her hands 1988 Family travels to Europe, visiting Paris and Italy 1991 Family moves to Atlanta 1994 Develops a strong interest in the arts. Takes classes in woodworking, metalsmithing, glass blowing, ceramics and drawing 1997 While visiting her mother’s family in North Carolina, she participates in an Asheville Area Arts Council workshop conducted by influential New York artist Lester Hayes 1999 Begins undergraduate study at Yale and is formally introduced to Western art history and thought Reads Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man Begins working as Joe Scanlan's studio assistant, helping to fabricate works and manage his fledgling publishing enterprise, Commerce Books 2001 Takes courses in History, Sociology, Psychology at Yale 2002 Concentrates on Art History, Studio Art and African-American and Afro-Caribbean courses. Begins to sense that there is more to art than pure thought, expression and reflection, and realizes there are underlying issues of colonialism, history and politics to what is being taught as the art historical canon. She becomes very interested in how and why her art history courses focus on European and American Art—and even then, people of color are rarely represented. The rest of the world—Asia, Africa, the Arab world, the Americas—falls into the déclassé category of "crafts." She begins to wonder where she fits in this mélange. Deduces that there’s a fine line between authorship, appropriation and influence, and decides that things can flow both ways. Makes her first "Cubist" painting from wood scraps while working in Mr. Scanlan's studio Edits 4166 Sea View Lane: A Reader, an anthology dedicated to Jorge Pardo's infamous house built as a sculpture under the auspices of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 2003 Helps in a take-over of the presidents office in response to the University’s insufficient response to attacks on students of color at Yale Earns a BA in Fine Art, with a concentration in Graphic Design, from Yale University Rents her first studio in the corner of a lumber reclamation factory in New Haven, Connecticut 2004 Publishes her first article, “I Have A Dream,” in Ante no. 3 (spring) Participates in her first show, BUY AMERICAN, at Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris Moves to Brooklyn 2006
Participates in her first exhibition in New York, a group show titled Data Mining at Wallspace She decides it’s good to have a stable income, and pick up some new skills from a trade. After treading through several design jobs she settles into advertising. The process of creating images and personas for the public to devour intrigues her. Cutting and pasting reality to make reality. Or is it to alter it? Ambivalent about how much to invest herself in the job, she decides gladly her heart is not in it. She resumes her task in the same spirit as the actors she casts in the advertisements she helps produce. It is one of her greatest performances to date. She continues to make art. 2007 Moves to Harlem. Stages her first one-person show at Galerie Chez Valentin in Paris. Participates in Artissima, Torino. Makes her New York stage debut at Artist's Space, Soho. 2008
Stages her first one-person show in the United States at Wallspace, New York Moves to Harlem, where she rents a cramped but cheap basement studio in a brownstone in Sugar Hill. The transition from her spacious, sunlit studio in New Haven to her damp, electric-lit dungeon is shocking. She tries to adjust but is loosing enthusiasm for her wooden collages and finds herself more and more interested in found images, found fabrics, the internet. She can see the end of the wooden collages not too far off, in the bottom of the last bin of scraps salvaged from the reclamation factory. Several self-reflexive images coalesce out of the scraps: a head of a woman, a foreshortened mirror, a shattered image of Elizabeth Montgomery As part of the group exhibition Double Agent, she sets up a working studio in a gallery at the ICA, London. To her delight, it is one of the same rooms where Marcel Broodthaers installed Decor in 1975. For seven weeks she works on collages, reads, and interacts with the viewing public With Mark Sladen, director of the ICA, she attends a reception for Mario Garcia Torres at White Cube
Gives a public lecture on her work as part of Double Agent. In the course of the subsequent question and answer session with Sladen and co-curator Claire Bishop, Donelle reveals that she is a character being portrayed by an actress and is therefore not 'real' the conventional sense of an 'artist' who makes 'work' -- but that Donelle Woolford in fact does exist. The audience seems confused. A questioner asks Abigail Ramsay, the actress playing Donelle at the time, if she has met the real Donelle. She says she has. Another question wonders if the American artist Joe Scanlan, who has been credited as the primary person responsible for Donelle Woolford, is real, and if so, is he in the audience? Yes, he is real but no, he is not in the audience. Still another questioner asks, in reference to some images included in Donelle's lecture, if Sharjah is a real place and the Sheik of Sharjah a real person. Yes and yes again. Still another audience member persists in asking again – this time to Claire Bishop -- if Donelle Woolford exists. Ms. Bishop assures them that she does. Donelle is relieved Gives a lecture as part of a conference titled La Copia, Lo Falso (y El Original) [The Copy, the Counterfeit (and the Original), sponsored by XV Jornadas de Estudio de La Imagen, Madrid. The backbone of her lecture is an archive of portraits of all the actors who auditioned for the opportunity to portray her. The audience is stunned. So many personality types! How to choose? Donelle admits that she has often asked herself the same question Discovers in a review that appears in frieze magazine that her biography is 'overdetermined'. Although she is not sure what that means exactly, since she knows many people who share part if not all of her story –- Black, raised in the south, Ivy-league educated, living in New York -- she decides the critic, Melissa Gronfund, is right. The fact that something actually happened, whether it happened once or a thousand times, is no justification for its being integral to a work of fiction. She changes her place of birth from Conyers, Georgia, to Detroit, Michigan, and decides her family moved to Conyers when she was twelve years old. She wonders whether she should continue to live Harlem. Contemplates moving to Astoria, or Riverdale, or some other less-conspicuous neighborhood. Maybe Tribeca or Grammercy Park. Maybe Williamsburg. Travels to the Mead Art Gallery of Warwick University, Coventry, where she hosts a Friday night salon and portfolio review as part of Double Agent Simultaneously travels to The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, where she sets up another working studio as part of Double Agent Stages her first one-person show in The Netherlands at Galerie de Expeditie, Amsterdam Solotentoonstellingen
2008
Donelle Woolford, Galerie de Expeditie, Amsterdam
Donelle Woolford, Wallspace, New York 2007
Donelle Woolford: A Narrative, Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris Groepstentoonstellingen 2008
Double Agent, ICA, London
2007
New Economy, Artist’s Space, New York Still Life: Art, Ecology and the Politics of Change, 8th Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates 2006 Data Mining, Wallspace, New York Open Studios, Artspace, New Haven, Connecticut 2005 BMW, IX Baltic Triennial, Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius Art Basel Miami, Miami Invisible, Yvon Lambert Gallery, New York Open Studios, Artspace, New Haven, Connecticut Two or Three Americans Field Questions About Their Country From In Bed, press conference, Galerie de Expeditie, Amsterdam 2004 Buy American, Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris Simple Things, Afro-American Cultural Center, Yale University, New Haven 2002 Octopus, Bruges, Belgium |
