Byline: Suzanne Muchnic

Most customers at Trader Joe’s have food on their minds. Not Ann Weber. While others grab favorite items off the shelves, the intrepid artist heads for the dumpsters. Perpetually on the lookout for cardboard boxes to transform into sculpture, she has an eye for colorful labels, crisp black letters and remnants of shipping tape, but she isn’t opposed to plain brown.
“I love making beauty from nothing,” Weber says. And, as nothingness goes, cardboard is just about perfect. It’s free for the taking and so light that she can easily pick up and move her works—even those that are bigger than she is. “Another thing that’s important,” she says, “is the basicness, the mundanity and commonness of the material.”

At home in San Pedro, where Weber, 65, has lived for the last two years, she bends, twists, weaves and staples ragged strips of cardboard into organic abstractions that hang on walls or stand on the floor. A coat of polyurethane gives her oddly elegant bulbs and towers a glossy finish, but there’s nothing slick about her work. At first glance, it seems as if she has merged the purity of Brancusi and Arp with the rawness of Arte Povera. Relatively simple in their sweeping, bulging silhouettes, the sculptures are richly complex in surface patterns and details.

A studio potter turned sculptor, Weber shifted from plaster to cardboard 15 years ago, while living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Weary of hauling heavy materials up the stairs to her studio in Oakland, she had an epiphany. “There was this big pile of cardboard on the floor and I thought about Frank Gehry’s furniture,” she recalls in an interview at the San Pedro galleries TransVagrant and Gallery 47, where an eye-popping array of her work fills the exhibition space.

“And then I thought, ‘Who cares about material?’” Certainly not Weber, at least not in terms of preciousness. A connoisseur of dumpsters, she has rescued cardboard far and wide, including Italian trash bins during a residency at the American Academy of Rome, and now makes daily trips to her local Trader Joe’s.

“I had used papier maché, like Niki de St. Phalle, working with very simple forms,” Weber says. “And I had pulled balls of clay into cylinders. So I started making cardboard circles and cylinders, and then the cylinders sort of took on these personages, almost like Louise Bourgeois’ Personages that I had seen at the Guggenheim in the ’70s. At first I thought cardboard couldn’t be the final material. But I liked it and just kept going. I felt that it had infinite possibilities. So that’s what I’m still doing, although I do cast things in fiberglass or bronze for public art commissions.”

Born in Jackson, Michigan, and raised in Evansville, Indiana, Weber earned her BA degree from Purdue University in 1972. She planned to become an interior decorator, like her hometown’s most independent woman, but hated her first class. After changing her major to art history, she learned to make pottery from Marge Levy, who “knew all the heavy hitters in ceramics,” she says. “Marge taught us not just how to throw, but how to think about sculpture.”

Weber fell in love with a fellow student potter and married him the day after their graduation. They set up a pottery studio in Ithaca, New York, and “worked like dogs” for several years, she says. “But then I had had it, so we went our separate ways.” After supporting herself by waitressing and running another pottery studio, she moved to New York and began selling her white porcelain pottery to retailers like Barneys, Henri Bendel and Bloomingdales. But production burnout led her to take a class at Greenwich House Pottery where her teacher, James Makins, advised her to go to graduate school on the West Coast. In 1985, Weber landed at the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland where ceramic sculptor Viola Frey became her mentor. “I had no idea how to make the leap,” she says. “Viola taught me how to be an artist, how to think like an artist.”

These days, Weber thinks of her cardboard sculptures as “metaphors for my personal life experiences. Like how high you can make something before it collapses? Or the balancing acts. What do you give up to be an artist? What about family relationships and financial stability?” In the end, though, she has a broader view of her work: “It’s an embodiment of something that speaks to people.”

“Ann Weber, Sculpture” at TransVagrant gallery and Gallery 478, in San Pedro, has been extended through May 12.

If you are familiar with Laurie Fendrich’s work, you know that the artist is a New York–based painter of vibrant geometric abstractions that strike a precarious balance between order and subterfuge. And you may have heard about her 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. But do you know that she is also a writer and teacher who embraces English novelist Jane Austen as a kindred spirit, advocates for painting in probing essays, teaches students to paint the old-fashioned way and dishes out heretical ideas in seminars called “Thinking about Art”?

Compressing all that in a brief profile is a challenge, but she helps by dismissing most of her early years. “I don’t have an interesting family story,” says Fendrich, 68, who was born in Paterson, New Jersey. “It’s just a plain old American background. In the rise of identity politics, I have nothing to offer.”

Even so, her evolution was not all that predictable. As a young artist surrounded by “American stuff,” she devoured well-drawn comic strips and developed a strong affinity for Stuart Davis’ painting. But what about Austen, who used words, not images, to detail the tightly regulated lives of her country’s landed gentry more than a century before Fendrich was born?
“When I was young, I got very sick and a teacher gave me a collection of Jane Austen’s novels,” she explains in a telephone interview. “That sort of changed my life. I may not have understood the novels, but I loved them. It’s the form, the way she is in such control of the plot, and the people who have such passion.”

Beyond their fine craftsmanship and comic edge, Fendrich’s spirited abstractions and Austen’s captivating stories may appear to have little in common. But as critic Mark W. Stevens has noted, Austen is a touchstone for Fendrich, who draws strength from the novels and titles some of her paintings after them. Although the connections are largely unnoticed, both the books and the artworks are the creations of women who work in circumscribed territory—Austen as a keen observer of human behavior at a particular time and place, Fendrich as a deft orchestrator of flat, interlocking, richly colored, soft-edged shapes. Both bodies of work are relatively modest in size and ambition, but intricately fashioned and extraordinarily complex. Things come apart but then fall into place.

In her youth, Fendrich could not have imagined that Austen would have a profound influence on her life’s work, or even what that work would be. As a student at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, where she earned a BA in 1970, she studied painting but—mainly as a practical matter—majored in political science and gravitated to political philosophy with the goal of becoming a scholar. A few years later, when she came to terms with the fact that her true passion was painting, she entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received her MFA in 1978.

Married to art critic and painter Peter Plagens since 1981, Fendrich has pursued parallel careers as an artist and teacher. From 1989 to 2014 her academic home was Hofstra University in Hempstead on Long Island. But she dreamed up the first of many “Thinking about Art” seminars in the early 1980s, while teaching at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
Drawing from her undergraduate background in philosophy, Fendrich assigned her students to read the writings of great thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle and, especially, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who contended that civilization in general and the arts in particular tend to corrupt human morals and goodness. “That’s what wakes up students the most,” she says of Rousseau’s attack on the arts. “They don’t like it at first, but they are really intrigued. The students are astonished that anyone would argue that the arts are bad for society. But the arguments are so powerful that they fumble to defend themselves.” And that’s the point.

Of her Hofstra painting classes, Fendrich says: “The largest and most important goal is for my students to go away with an understanding that painting is a really beautiful and critically important part of culture. Not in an art-historical sense—I show images of works by great painters, alive today and from the past, but the overarching thing is that I love painting and I teach from that. It’s not a gooey thing; I teach the basics and proudly.”

All too aware that she is out of sync with a pedagogical shift that favors critical thinking over technical expertise, Fendrich tells students that they are going to learn such things as how to hold a brush and lay out a palette. “After you go away, your job is to do what you want—break the rules, bend them, whatever,” she says. “But you need something to start with and we will start with these rules.” In her opinion, “people who violate that are doing a disservice to students.”

Fendrich’s essays, a relatively recent pursuit, grew from a lecture presented at Hofstra in 1997 and revised for publication in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1999 under the title “Why Painting Still Matters.” Focusing on abstract painting, she made a case for it as “an ineffable balance of sensation, experience and knowledge. In the midst of a world in which everything we see is morphing into something else, abstract painting is one of the few things left that allows us to see the possibility of something remaining constant.”

Although her subjects vary from French painter Henri Matisse to American critic Dave Hickey, Fendrich views her essays collectively as “a polemic to defend painting against hostile forces. They are wagon-circling pieces,” she says. “I have either written about painting or people who paint with an attitude that painting is the highest art form, the queen of the art forms. I am fully aware of the contemporary art world, but it doesn’t change the fact that the other arts need painting to be considered art. Painting doesn’t need them. But without painting, the other arts glide and shift into real life.”

“Laurie Fendrich” at Louis Stern Fine Arts in Beverly Hills, through December 3, 2016.