Five

Five: Becca Day, Tara Kelley-Cruz, Valerie Lloyd, Jes Moran, and Diane Reeves

Surface Gallery

2752 W. Colorado Avenue, Colorado Springs, CO 80904

February 2-23, 2024

Admission: Free

Review by José Antonio Arellano

February’s show at Surface Gallery in Old Colorado City demonstrates what is possible when women revive a breakaway legacy of modernism. The show, titled Five, groups together the painters Becca Day, Tara Kelley-Cruz, Valerie Lloyd, Jes Moran, and Diane Reeves. To find models of perseverance, the artists turned to the five women highlighted in Mary Gabriel’s book Ninth Street Women (2018): Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell. 

An installation view of the exhibition Five at Surface Gallery in Colorado Springs. Image by Jes Moran.

The contemporary artists had already established their own unique approaches to painterly abstraction, having displayed their work in multiple galleries throughout the Colorado Springs area for years. What they looked for in the past were examples of women who continued to innovate and create despite the many obstacles they encountered. 

The Colorado artists decided to each pick one of the five abstract expressionist painters and read about her life. There is more historical information available today thanks in part to books like Mary Gabriel’s and major exhibitions, including the Denver Art Museum’s 2016 Women of Abstract Expressionism. An exhibition of this magnitude produces ripple effects that will be felt for decades. 

Just to give you one example: last summer, the Berry Campbell Gallery in New York City exhibited West Coast Women of Abstract Expressionism. Christine Berry and Martha Campbell developed the idea for this show after the Denver exhibition introduced them to names of artists from the West Coast that the gallerists had never encountered. [1]

Flows of influence transcend their historical specificity and geographic boundaries, from “New York” to “San Francisco” to “Denver” and back, city names that inadequately capture a far wider reach. The New York City of the 1950s can thus speak to the Colorado Springs of the 2020s. With the pieces displayed in Five, the five contemporary artists can create a response. 

The five artists in the Five exhibition at Surface Gallery. From left to right: Jes Moran, Tara Kelley-Cruz, Valerie Lloyd, Becca Day, and Diane Reeves. Image courtesy of Jes Moran.

This painterly dialogue with historical figures parallels the rapport that the contemporary artists have established with each other. The artists offer each other support and motivation, empathy, and encouragement. Their model of mutually uplifting friendship should be celebrated. [2] These women have formed what we could describe, following Frances Lazare who riffs on Virginia Woolf, “a cohort of one’s own.” [3] Reviewing two recent monographs dedicated to studying the history of women modernists, Lazare describes how we are only starting to learn about such “coteries of women” that change the way we think of the tradition of modernism. 

Simply contrast the desire for a supportive, mutually uplifting community to the “irascible” artists who went by several names, including the pejorative “spatter-and-daub school,” the more neutral (and geographically colonizing) “New York School,” and the more notorious label “Abstract Expressionists.” [4] Many of the men grouped under such labels sought to differentiate themselves from each other, from Paris, and from established artistic traditions, to assert their individuality instead. “We agree only to disagree,” is how Irving Sandler described the situation. [5] This bravado is often characterized as heroically independent—an example of liberal individualism. Tellingly, Lee Krasner characterized the lot of these male artists as one saturated with insecurity. [6]

An installation view of the Five exhibition at Surface Gallery. Image by Jes Moran.

The Colorado artists’ sense of mutual support is instead an enactment of the vision that motivated Valerie Lloyd to open Surface Gallery. Lloyd had previously owned The Machine Shop in Colorado Springs, which offered residencies for artists and a pop-up gallery to showcase their work. Lloyd wanted something more permanent, envisioning a well-designed space that could operate as a creative haven. Surface Gallery is located within the renovated building called The Sluice, which includes artist studios, the architecture and design firm Echo, Story Coffee, and other small creative businesses. 

A view of the façade of Surface Gallery. Image by José Antonio Arellano.

During my first visit to Surface Gallery in September 2022, I introduced myself to Lloyd, who introduced me to Diane Reeves—the artist with a solo show in the gallery that month. As transplants to Colorado, Reeves and I talked about finding our bearings in a mountainous region. We connected over our mutual interest in interior design. We attempted to articulate the intuition that design is the material embodiment of a purposeful ethos that orients and expresses the good life. This nonverbal, non-conceptual sensibility comes from a belief in the necessity of aesthetic experiences as not merely a decorative sheen.

I understood why Reeves and Lloyd were friends and why Reeves had a show at Surface. The ethos of intentional design motivated the restoration of The Sluice building and is present everywhere in the gallery. Since that initial meeting, my wife and I have gotten to know Reeves and her husband. We have visited their home, where she makes space to paint when and where she can. Her oldest daughter is in college. Her youngest son is a toddler. I share these more personal details because it is difficult for me to separate Reeves’s painting from her life as a mother, wife, friend, and artist.

Diane Reeves, Directly Behind It, Half Way Up, acrylic and gesso on canvas, 16 x 20 inches. Image courtesy of Surface Gallery.

Reeves related to my wife and me how, in a moment of doubt, she threw away the painting titled Directly Behind It, Half Way Up. When you look at the painting, you can almost feel the layers of gesso and acrylic. It contains remnants of stops and starts, of added paint indicating a change in direction. I can almost hear Reeves's internal dialogue, in which a new addition could get the painting closer to its conclusion, or ruin hours of labor. The painting now hangs on the walls of Surface, a testament to Reeves’s perseverance and vision: a finished work of art that exists despite—and because of—everything in its maker’s life. 

Diane Reeves, Lady Painter, acrylic and gesso on canvas, 36 x 48 inches. Image courtesy of Surface Gallery.

Scanning the displayed paintings from right to left, we begin with Reeves’s black and white Lady Painter, a title that references Joan Mitchell’s sarcastic self-designation. Acknowledging that she had to compete with male artists for recognition and knowing that the men would never admit she was just as good as they were—if not better—Mitchell infamously commented that her paintings were “Not bad for a lady painter.” [7]

Becca Day, In Memory of My Feelings, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches. Image courtesy of Surface Gallery.

Becca Day’s black and white In Memory of My Feelings could be seen as joining Reeves in visually bookending the show. Day’s title references a poem by the poet Frank O’Hara dedicated to his friend Grace Hartigan. In an email, Day describes the painting as an “abstracted photograph” of Hartigan and O’Hara. [8] We could apprehend within this piece a formal neutralization of what would have been gendered differences in status. Bodies are only intimated in the painting, as is their spatial relation to each other. Knowing the origin of the title, we could imagine the dynamics of friendship between a queer poet and a woman painter, a friendship that would have been socially inscribed into a status hierarchy even if their friendship would seek to render it irrelevant. 

Simply contrast Day’s approach to Lawrence Larkin’s 1949 photograph of a standing Pollock looking down on Lee Krasner, seated on the floor. Or consider Hans Numuth’s photograph of Pollock in action with brush in hand and canvas on the floor, while a seated Krasner looks on from the background. The images exhibit a gendered, compositional hierarchy that reflects an unfortunate reality. Krasner famously took over the barn Pollock had used as a studio only after his untimely death. A studio of her own.

Becca Day, Beyond, Beyond, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches. Image courtesy of Surface Gallery.

After reading about Hartigan’s life and immersing herself in her body of work, Day followed Hartigan’s lead and limited herself to oils for her own paintings. She chose Hartigan’s New England, October (1957) as inspiration for Beyond, Beyond. Hartigan’s horizontal composition remains visible in Day’s painting, but Hartigan’s echoes of a landscape instead become a more easeful, explicit meditation on gesture and shape in Day’s painting. I might even go so far as to suggest that Day’s gestural form of abstraction suggests the dual meanings of the term and name “grace.” 

This discussion of the difference between the structure of photographic portraits and abstracted paintings resonates with Valerie Lloyd’s works. My first encounter with Lloyd took place at Kreuser Gallery, now named Auric Gallery, in October 2023. Lloyd had painted contemplative still lives for her show titled Home. 

Valerie Lloyd, Even on Mondays, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches. Image courtesy Auric Gallery.

She rendered in oil paint what could be described as photographic snapshots—quiet and intimate moments of her life at home. The work appeared to ask its viewers to consider the power of a still-life painting today. When so many of us carry cameras in our pockets, why would anyone spend the time painstakingly producing a painting? 

A few of Lloyd’s paintings from the Home show register the traces that bodies leave behind after a night’s sleep. The paintings portray the trace of absence, rendered not indexically through photography but, instead, filtered experientially through Lloyd’s first-person perception. It is Lloyd’s eye, not the camera’s lens, that enables us to see.

Valerie Lloyd, A Rose by a Few Other Names, oil on canvas, 36 x 24 inches. Image courtesy of Surface Gallery.

With the works included in Five, Lloyd continues to answer the question: Why painting? She offers what, for Clement Greenberg, in the mid-twentieth century constituted the paradigmatic answer: painting that asserted its specifically painterly status. Lloyd’s A Rose by a Few Other Names focuses the viewers’ attention on a depicted flower rendered in oil then enacts the process of painterly abstraction as our eyes register the neighboring gestural shapes.

I continue this process in my mind, shape turning into color, color into mood, but the full dematerialization does not occur within the painting, nor the other paintings Lloyd includes in this show. A Rose by a Few Other Names maintains the legibility of a still life that gives meaning to Lloyd’s other paintings, including Seattle Sunshine and If Elaine Were Her Name.

This emphasis of painting approximates what Greenberg had credited as abstraction’s salutary strength. In the face of the increasing “rationalization” of all aspects of American life, argued Greenberg, painters made explicit the conditions of painting as painting— discarding the conventions that were deemed not to be integral to the medium (say, perspective and shading) and asserting those that were (say, the paint and the canvas). [9]

Valerie Lloyd, Seattle Sunshine, oil on canvas, 36 x 24 inches. Image courtesy of Surface Gallery.

Of course, the story Greenberg told—in the manner he told it—had already looked outdated by the mid-1960s. [10] Simply recall the Pop Art and Performance Art that exploded during the mid-1960s and 1970s. During the 1980s, every previous artistic style and tradition became available in a postmodern liberation of creative possibilities—a democratization of styles. Abstraction became just one of a nearly countless array of styles that could no longer claim a Greenbergian sense of historical necessity. Yet, this pluralistic explosion also came to appear outmoded. Even a decade ago, the very styles and techniques championed by Greenberg were deemed so passé that their reemergence in the art world was characterized by critics as “zombie formalism.” [11]

I summarize this familiar art history to say that abstract painting today risks appearing atavistic if it does not make a case for itself. Abstraction today must be consciously activated or risk being a mere style we either like or do not like, the “zombie formalism” of market preference. I take this to be the thematized breakdown visible in A Rose by a Few Other Names, wherein abstraction begins to take hold, breaking down the still life but not entirely. The legibility of the still life remains even as it is visually dissolved.

Tara Kelley-Cruz, Early Bird, mixed media on cradled wood panel, 12 x 12 inches. Image courtesy of Surface Gallery.

In Tara Kelley-Cruz’s more graphic work, legibility is simultaneously invoked and occluded through collage and acrylic paint on cradled wood panels. The thicker wooden panel support allows Kelley-Cruz to add multiple layers of paint and other media that she can scrape away and physically inscribe. By using “skewers, sandpaper, various scrapers, [and] trowels,” she tells me in an email, she can “subtract or leave marks by digging in.” [12]

Tara Kelley-Cruz, Meander, mixed media on cradled wood panel, 36 x 36 inches. Image courtesy of Surface Gallery.

The piece Early Bird includes what looks like a cutout of P.D. Eastman’s children's book Flap Your Wings (1969), although a quick perusal through my daughters’ copy of the book did not produce this exact image. As with the collage elements visible in Meander, the identification of the fragmented images is beside the point.

Tara Kelley-Cruz, Clandestine, mixed media on cradled wood panel, 48 x 48 inches. Image courtesy of Surface Gallery.

The piece titled Clandestine includes graphic marks made by Kelley-Cruz’s hand as well as fragments of textual media that suggest legibility. Notice the inclusion of the word “picture” on the bottom right, a word that has been flipped upside down and struck through with white paint. The paint is not thick enough to fully occlude the word, but the strikethrough remains poignant. The idea of this work, the strikethrough appears to indicate, is not the presentation of a “picture” of the world. Rather, the point is to abstract the very word “picture” and assert instead the totality of the work of art itself. 

A detail view of Tara Kelley-Cruz's Clandestine. Image by José Antonio Arellano 

The piece performs what Jacques Derrida might have termed “sous rature,” or writing “under erasure,“ by which he meant the crossing out of a word while leaving it in place to highlight the use of language but its ultimate inadequacy. Linguistic representation cannot re-present the world itself in its full plenitude, but we cannot help but use it.

If, for Derrida, representation will always fall short of something like full plenitude, Kelley-Cruz’s work instead shows that art can do what immediacy cannot. Art exists within our lives, of course, but it is itself not equivalent to “life.” That is precisely why we need it. Life abounds, all on its own. What we need today, perhaps more than ever, is mediation, the experiences of life rendered and framed. [13]

Jes Moran, Film Strip, acrylic on sewn canvas, 60 x 48 inches. Image courtesy of Surface Gallery.

The fullest implications of the continued relevance of abstract painting were made visible to me by Jes Moran’s deeply affecting explorations. Moran combines the trajectories that Alfred Barr had famously contrasted between the “geometric-structural tendency” of rectilinear abstract art (stemming from the tradition of Seurat, Cezanne, and Cubism) and the more “intuitive and emotional” curvilinear gestural abstraction (the tradition of Gauguin, Matisse, and Fauvism). [14]

Moran invokes the fluid movements of Helen Frankenthaler’s thinned paint, which Frankenthaler let seep into unprimed canvases, but adds to this movement a sense of construction resulting from cutting up the painted canvas and sewing it together to produce her designs. We see in her work not simply the effects of gravity pulling on thinned paint, but also the traces of Moran’s hands suturing the cut canvas to produce her final works of art.  

When I asked Moran via email to describe her artistic practice, she described a series of combinations of “chaos and planning,” boldness and vibrancy, and softness. “I try to highlight the contrast of these two different types of techniques in the work,” writes Moran.

Jes Moran, Grab Your Shades, acrylic on sewn canvas, 16 x 14 inches. Image courtesy of Surface Gallery.

“The stain painting is chaotic and unpredictable at times. The watered-down pigments pour in different directions or drip onto the canvas when I least expect it. Gravity has a say in which way the paint will flow, although I can somewhat manipulate the paint by tilting the canvas in a certain direction, or by dragging my brush through the paint. I also paint with the canvas on the ground. Ultimately it is more of an uncontrolled process.”

Moran contrasts this “uncontrolled process” to the control she does implement. “I have total control over the sewing,” she writes. She can, therefore, actively choose “what parts of the painting will be sewn back together, the shapes created from the seams, and the colors that lie next to each other. The final windows or frames that are painted on at the end are planned out with chalk marks and then carefully painted in thinned layers of paint.” [15]

I quote Moran freely here to show that she is not simply a legatee of innovations we can attribute to Frankenthaler. If Greenberg saw in Frankenthaler’s work an important step in painting’s progression away from the Color Field painters (including Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko) and away from “gestural compositions” (of Pollock, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning), toward the “Post-Painterly Abstraction” of the 1960s (of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland), we can imagine him considering Moran’s work as a development that pushes painting toward something like its next phase. [16]

Jes Moran, Light Leak #1 and Light Leak #2, acrylic on sewn canvas, both 48 x 36 inches. Image courtesy of Surface Gallery.

The painted borders that partially frame the canvases of Light Leak #1 and Light Leak #2 produce a sense of archways, what Moran calls “windows,” that imply the inner space of the painting without fully enclosing the canvases. These additions create a framing effect that does not fully contain the movements within. The added rectangular stripes of light blue on both canvases indicate the horizontal and vertical orientations of the diptych, thereby referencing the ultimate shape—the final form—of Moran’s design. 

The absorbing color combinations of Moran’s paintings are inviting, prompting me to want to inhabit their inner world. Yet, I simultaneously revel in my realization that I exist outside of the paintings as a beholder of art. This is art that expresses something to me that I register as the truth of my very being: I am battered about by the forces of nature, call them “gravity” for short.

But I, somehow, also consider myself to exist in a self-legislating relation to the actions I consider to be my own. I think of myself as giving reasons for my choices, for the actions I make—if retroactively, only in hindsight. In the best cases, I see myself reflected in my work, choices, and actions. Moran’s paintings make me realize this about myself, today: I have a deep abiding desire to consider myself autonomous and be recognized by the world as such.

Insofar as I see in this work something like the invocation of “autonomy,” we must recall the contradiction that women artists in the mid-twentieth century faced. If twentieth-century abstract paintings could invoke a sense of “artistic autonomy” it was deemed “incompatible with female identity” by the art world that did not recognize the contributions of women. [17]

A view of works by Valerie Lloyd and Tara Kelley-Cruz in the exhibition Five. Image by Jes Moran.

Paradoxically, the gendered inequalities of the twentieth century may have produced the very conditions for abstract expressionism as the place for the female artists’ sense of freedom. “Given the diminished societal role of women at the time,” writes Gwen F. Chanzit, “a canvas might be the sole platform for a woman’s autonomy.” [18] Notice here the problem: the canvas might be the only place for women’s autonomy, but, devoid of recognition, such a canvas risks enabling a formal freedom existing solely in a vacuum. The autonomy of art would in this sense operate as compensation for the cruelties of the world. 

We should recall that insofar as an artist of Frankenthaler’s brilliance “pushed” abstraction “forward,” her innovation was characterized as a development in form that abstracted away her body and erased her identity as a woman. [19] Whereas the white males of abstract expressionism could be characterized as having achieved something like “universality,” they did not have to abstract away their subjective and social identities. We should ask, Who, throughout history, can play the game of “universality” without having to give up who they want to be recognized as? 

I would like to think that the American society of the 2020s is much different than that of the 1950s, and in many crucial ways it is. But the fact that we can readily identify the instances wherein the realm of autonomy, made possible by recognition, remains unequally distributed and enjoyed suggests that the abstract art in this show remains pressingly relevant today. 

José Antonio Arellano (he/his) is an Associate Professor of English and Fine Arts at the United States Air Force Academy. He holds a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago. He is currently working on two manuscripts titled Race Class: Reading Mexican American Literature in the Era of Neoliberalism, 1981-1984 and Life in Search of Form: 20th Century Mexican American Literature and the Problem of Art.

[1] Frances Lazare, “Gallery Talk - West Coast Women of Abstract Expressionism,” YouTube, 18 July 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueDBXVX-uz8.

[2] “Is true friendship possible in the art world?” asks Anna Ostoya in a review of Isabelle Graw’s recent book On The Benefits of Friendship (2023): “It’s a question rarely asked out loud in an industry famously riddled with self-interest, opportunism, and backstabbing.” Anna Ostoya, “The Social Network: Issabelle Graw’s On the Benefits of Friendship,” Artforum, 29 Dec. 2023, www.artforum.com/columns/anna-ostoya-isabelle-graw-on-the-benefits-of-friendship-544880/.

[3] Frances Lazare, “A Cohort of One’s Own,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 7 Oct. 2020, lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-cohort-of-ones-own/. 

[4] Barbara Hess, Abstract Expressionism. (Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 2005), 7.

[5] Quoted in Hess, 7.

[6] “In each and every one of them,” Krasner told an interviewer, “you knew how threatened he felt: the hostility was physically palpable. The whole culture’s like that.” Quoted in Hess, 17.

[7] See Patricia Albers, Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011).

[8] Rebecca Day, email received by José Antonio Arellano, 12 January 2024.

[9] Clement Greenberg, “‘American-Type’ Painting” (1958), Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 206.

[10] This is Arthur Danto’s view, most clearly expressed in After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

[11] See Walter Robinson, “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism.”, Artspace, 3 April 2014, www.artspace.com/magazine/contributors/see_here/the_rise_of_zombie_formalism-52184.

[12] Tara Kelley-Cruz, email received by José Antonio Arellano, 11 January 2024.  

[13] See Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or the Style of Too-Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2024). 

[14] Hess, 7. Hess summarizes Alfred Barr’s catalog to the 1936 exhibition “Cubism and Abstract Art” at the Museum of Modern Art.

[15] Jes Moran, email received by Jose Antonio Arellano, 13 January 2024.

[16] See Hess, 17. See also Ellen G. Landau, “Working ‘In A Different Way’: Women and Abstract Expressionism,” Abstract Expressionists: The Women (New York: Merrell Publishers Ltd, 2023), 12-16.

[17] Hess, 17.

[18] Gwen F. Chanzit, “Introduction to the Exhibition,” Women of Abstract Expressionism (Denver Art Museum: In Association with Yale University Press, 2016), 10.

[19] This is Marcia Brennan’s compelling argument in “How Formalism Lost Its Body but Kept Its Gender: Frankenthaler, Louis, and Noland in the Sixties,” Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction (Cambridge: MIT, 2006), 116-151.