New Collections: Deborah Bright, Virginia Jaramillo, and Walton Ford Oral Histories

This entry is part of an ongoing series highlighting new collections. The Archives of American Art collects primary source materials—original letters, writings, preliminary sketches, scrapbooks, photographs, financial records, and the like—that have significant research value for the study of art in the United States. The following essay was originally published in the Spring 2023 issue (vol. 62, no. 1) of the Archives of American Art Journal. More information about the journal can be found at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/aaa/current. 

In new oral histories, photographer Deborah Bright intimately chronicles lesbian life at home and at large, painter Virginia Jaramillo describes her refined abstraction to reveal new tracks in a well-trodden art-historical narrative, and painter Walton Ford sardonically yet sympathetically reclaims animal life from human paradigms.

In virtual conversation with Ann Cvetkovich, director of the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women's and Gender Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, Bright (b. 1950) delves into her portrayals of public and private queer lives since the 1980s. On her turn to drawing in recent years, she says she found herself developing “a semiotics of queer desire, if you want to kind of sound scholarly—what does desire look like for a 60-year-old lesbian?” Beyond her own dexterous practice, Bright details her efforts, as a writer and educator, to bring queer art spaces and institutions to light, giving shape and visibility to these vital pockets of community.

Southwestern Texas-born Jaramillo (b. 1939) chronicles making her name in abstract art in the early 1970s through her Curvilinear paintings—spare, “pensive” compositions inspired by Japanese woodcuts (“It’s all about placement. That line better say something!”)—and describes her participation in forward-thinking, racially integrated exhibitions such as The De Luxe Show (1971), which was held at the De Luxe Theater in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Houston. She also discusses her late 1970s turn to stained canvases and then to making handmade paper colored with natural pigments: “The surface of the painting just began to disintegrate . . . . I wanted to get away from the rigidity of working with the Curvilinear, being so careful—after a while you move on, your consciousness develops into going in different directions.” On today’s American art world, she told interviewer Josh T. Franco, the Archives’ Head of Collecting, “How many Latina women artists are in major galleries? Still? Which is a shame. Before it was women, women period . . . [but] Black women artists and Latina women, they [still] don’t exist here [in the major gallery space]. It’s hard, it’s really hard.”

The striking, sometimes massive natural history watercolor paintings and drawings of Ford (b. 1960) have made a distinct claim for the critical currency of historical realism. In his interview with me, the artist recounts a childhood of obsessive sketching at the Natural History Museum in New York and inviting wildlife inside his mind and home, the grounds to which he returned in his mature practice. During our in-person conversation, Ford stressed the importance of interrogating human presumptions about and projections upon animals. He ventriloquized one potential impetus for an as-yet-unrealized work: “I can believe that that turtle wants that story to be told. ‘Your fleeting-ass human culture, and my actual body outlasts the rise and fall of your empires, and if you can’t be humble in the face of that, I don’t know what your problem is.’”

These conversations reveal the slips and strains en route to the artists’ solid footholds, as well as their ongoing commitment to change in the art world and beyond. Through the interviews, the urgency of these individuals’ political and formal approaches comes into focus as they strive to preserve queer, marginalized, and voiceless stories.

Ben Gillespie is the oral historian at the Archives of American Art.