NoHo, New York
Brenda Miller
Works from the 70s
Zürcher GalleryZürcher Gallery is thrilled to rediscover the work of Brenda Miller (b. 1941 in the Bronx, NY) who has not been shown in a New York art gallery since 1994. Brenda Miller is best known for her sisal wall sculptures, her typewriting, and her Alphabet rubber-stamped ink and pencil on wall or paper she has made since 1969-70 and exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1975), Museum of Modern Art (1973) and later at P.S.1. In this first solo-show at Zürcher Gallery, we are presenting a selection of these 2 bodies of works from the 70s as well as a new Sisal work Entassis Too, 2024 created after Entassis, 1971, shown at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, and reproduced in the catalog of the Gedok American Woman Artist Show, Kunsthaus, Hamburg, Germany. Brenda Miller asserts that she is a feminist. She was actively involved with the women’s movement in New York in the 70s. She then co-founded the Ad-Hoc Women Artists Committee with Faith Ringold, Poppy Johnson, and Lucy Lippard. Her earliest work combined gender politics with Post-Minimal concerns of materials and process, frequently occupying a space between drawing and sculpture. For years, she has worked with repurposed materials like sisal and rubber stamps as a means to introduce content to abstraction. Brenda Miller was part of 26 Contemporary Women Artists at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT which was probably the FIRST American museum show of Women artists of “second wave" feminism. Her work shared approach, technique, or content to some degree with the work of Alice Adams, Carl Andre, Hanne Darboven, Jackie Ferrara, Nancy Holt, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Mary Miss, Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, and Jacky Winsor. Lucy Lippard writes in Art in America, Vol 64, N°3 ( May/June 1976): "Brenda Miller: Woven, Stamped. To a Minimalist vocabulary of formal qualities – repetition, symmetry, literality - Brenda Miller has added a distinct personal flavor: of aggressive feeling in her twine works and, in her alphabet pieces, of paradoxical obsessiveness and tranquility." Brenda Miller chooses a “specific” grammar to work within. The Sisal pieces and the Alphabet works are based on an underlying preconceived grid system. She chose the alphabet for its linear marks - curves, diagonals, horizontals, verticals. She starts with A and ends with Z. She uses rubber stamps to print each letter over and over again but leaves out the last letter, then the next to last and so on, each time around. She also uses a “non -reproducible" blue pencil as an editing tool in the drawing of the grid. The alphabet and its physical structure, the number of characters, and the numerical sequence of the characters are used to determine the system by which each piece is constructed. The repetition, the overlay, the number of impressions, the superimposition, and the accumulation cause density and contribute to the three-dimensionality of the work. The obsessive and time-consuming nature of her work indicates that Brenda Miller deals with time, change, and impermanence. Brenda Miller studied at the University of New Mexico where she was duly impressed by the Indian culture, the sand paintings, and art which can travel. “There was no need to preserve art there, the same drawing was passed through the generations … and yet, each transient drawing was so permanent.” In the Sisal sculptures conceived in 1972/73 and generated for the purpose of this show, the origin of the work is also a grid which she diagrams and then works from this diagram or map with picture hanging wire and sisal. So the work exists in all these different stages of existence. Lucy Lippard says that "Brenda Miller’s own pieces exist, then, 'ideally' (in the drawing or diagram stage), 'potentially' (in their capability of regeneration) and actually (when assembled on the wall).” Brenda Miller chose to work with sisal of the same thickness because it’s neutral, colorless, shapeless, available everywhere, inexpensive and its linearity is subject to gravity. She cuts “lines” of different lengths which she ties and knots to the wire grid to create a specific design which grows in density the more she adds material in order to obtain physical persistence. The end result being the physical remains of an intellectual activity.