ARTIST: ARLENE LOVE
Art Histories are highly curated presentations of an artists’ life’s work provided for appreciators today, scholars of tomorrow, and generations to come.
Arlene Love is an award-winning pioneer in resin sculpture and accomplished painter and photographer with numerous public art installations. For forty years, Love focused on sculpture, with solo shows from New York to California. Her work has been included in juried exhibitions in the Museum of Modern Art (NY), Boston Museum of Art, Sculpture Center (NYC), Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Cornell University, among others. Love’s sculpture is in the collections of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, James A Michener Museum, the University of Scranton and Franklin & Marshall College. In Philadelphia, her bronze Winged Woman is in the garden of the Dorchester facing Rittenhouse Square. Eight Figures, life size bronzes reside permanently in the Kimmel Center. The gold leafed Face Fragment is in front of the Monell Chemical Senses Center at 3500 Market Street.
Love’s focus began shifting toward drawing during the dozen years she and her husband lived in a tiny mountain village near the city of Oaxaca, Mexico. Her drawings, etchings and encaustics were exhibited in Oaxaca galleries and in exhibitions of Oaxaca artists. While in Oaxaca, she also worked in a print taller and created a portfolio of etchings which is in the Linda Lee Alter collection at PAFA.
Meanwhile, Love began taking photographs in her village and in neighboring markets. She loved taking pictures, but hated the darkroom, so she filled old shoe boxes with negatives, wondering why she kept taking pictures. In the year 2000, Love saw the words digital darkroom. Until recently, street photography and candid portraits were her sole passion. She never asked permission. She wanted the person without his or her mask. The present is just an illusion. As soon as the shutter snaps it's past. Her photograph of Old Lee is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Love has had more than thirty solo shows of sculpture, drawings and photographs, and is the recipient of awards and grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Leeway Foundation, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and Temple University.
Love has now returned to drawing. She wants the feel of pencil and crayon in her hand making tangible marks. Drawing is the magic of discovery.
“At times my work has explored difficult subjects, confronting the viewer with images that many found hard to look at ... I believe because people don’t want to look at what they fear the most for fear of seeing their own reflections. I use my work to focus experience, not to soothe.”
COLLECTION: SCULPTURE
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Publication Forward from Arlene Love: Sculpture & Drawings from 1957-2000
Written by Arlene Love
We were issued a block of clay, a figure armature and modeling tools. Reluctantly, I went to the sculpture studio. It was the first week of art school. I wanted to be a painter, but we were required to work in all media for the first two years. A nude model stood on a round stand in the middle of the studio, and the stand was turned every fifteen minutes. It was a thrill to work with volume and space, to see how light changes perception of form, and to work exclusively with interpretations of the human figure. My first experience of working in three dimensions was so exhilarating, that my primary medium for the next forty years was sculpture.
I was casting my sculpture in plaster and concrete - and bronze, when there was enough money. In 1954, the new Chevrolet Corvette made of resin and fiberglass was introduced, and I knew I had a new material. I could cast a figure standing tiptoe on one foot, and it would not break at the ankle. The next best characteristic was that the resin had no personality of its own. It was the quintessential whore. I filled the resin with bronze grindings and it patinated like bronze. I added pigment and made figures in life like color. The resin could be made translucent or opaque, and could imitate any material. I have been documented as a pioneer in using polyester resin and fiberglass as a casting medium for sculpture.
There was little awareness back then about the toxicity of plastics, so I spent thirty-five years up to my elbows in that sticky stinking material, with glass fibers sticking to my hands, arms and face. Assistants soon refused to work with it, so I worked alone. At the end of a work period, I practically bathed in acetone.
I am lucky to be alive and well.
PUBLICATION
Arlene Love: Sculpture & Drawings from 1957-2000
Published by ThirdAct Press
ISBN: 978-1495172816
PUBLICATION
Arlene Love/Sculpture
Written by Judith Stein
Published by Lee Lippman Associates, 1979
PUBLICATION
Contemporary American Women Sculptors
Written by Virginia Watson-Jones
Published by Oryx Press, 1986
ISBN: 978-0897741392
PUBLICATION
Plastics as Sculpture
Written by Thelma R. Newman
Published by Chilton Book Co, 1974
ISBN: 978-0801957673
PUBLICATION
Contemporary American Realism since 1960
Written by Frank H. Goodyear, Jr.
Published by New York Graphic Society in association with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1981
ISBN: 978-0821211267
Collection: DRAWINGS
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Artist Statement
My work, regardless of medium has always focused on depiction of the human image. The only exceptions are my series of drawings of the bullfight 1989-1997. This ritual of life and death with honor had fascinated me for decades. Most of the drawings show the bull as victor, even though we know the bull must die. Both the bull and the man will die - the bull within twenty minutes. The man - sooner or later.
From the Venus of Willendorf to the photographic image, I feel that the vehicle of expression most immediate and most compelling is the image of a human being. It is the image that expresses the most profound and basic emotions. It speaks back to us of our own vulnerability and humanity.
Collection: PUBLIC ART
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PUBLICATION
Public Art in Philadelphia
Written by Penny Balkin Bach
Published by Temple University Pr, 1992
ISBN: 978-0877228226
Collection: PHOTOGRAPHS
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Publication Forward from Walking Distance My Philadelphia
Written by Arlene Love
All the photographs in this book were taken between 2003 and 2015, within walking distance of where I've lived in Philadelphia. My camera goes with me when I walk out the door to go on my usual errands and to neighborhood events. | don’t wander into strange neighborhoods or look for a particular type of subject. Wherever | am there are people, and wherever there are people there are pictures to be taken.
My pictures are always candid. I want to catch the unguarded moment when people are within themselves and feel invisible. The split second click of the shutter records a fact but does not necessarily tell the truth. The reality experienced by the person in the picture, the story seen by the photographer, and the event interpreted by the viewer may be three different realities.
Susan Sontag said that the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's lives. Sometimes I wonder about the ethics of stealing people’s images; but on the other hand, it helps us to see our own connection with the humanity of others.
“The real journey of discovery consists not of seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
—Quote by Marcel Proust
PUBLICATION
Walking Distance My Philadelphia
Arlene Love
Published 2016
PUBLICATION
FACES
Arlene Love
Published 2010
PRESS
© Image courtesy of Arlene Love
Amie Potsic interviews Arlene Love, an award-winning pioneer in resin sculpture and accomplished draftswoman and photographer.
Highlights Include:
93-year-old artist continues to empower women in Philadelphia with new exhibit
by Matteo Iadonisi
Still from Arlene Love’s 6ABC Live News Interview
Recent Sculpture U.S.A.
An Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art
Manhattan, NY
Installation view of the exhibition "Recent Sculpture U.S.A."
May 13, 1959–August 16, 1959. Photographic Archive. The Museum of
Modern Art Archives, New York. IN644.1. © Photograph by Soichi Sunami.
Review/Art; Going Beyond Slickness:
Sculptors Get Back to Basics
Written by Michael Brenson
© Arlene Love, Wall of Souls, 55” x 122” x 6”, 1987
Style Spotlight
Volume 10 #3, June 2004
© Arlene Love with Rosey Crucifiction & Backroom Abortion 1972
Report From Philadelphia
Written by Sarah McFadden
© Arlene Love, Two woman at a table, life size figures, bronze filled polyester resin and fiberglass, wood furniture, 93” x 48” x 39”, 1966
The Village Voice
Centerfold
Written by Alexandria Anderson
© Arlene Love, El Toro y Yo #1, saponified crayon on mylar, 30” x 40”, 1992
Arlene Love in her studio © Image courtesy of Arlene Love
To acquire artwork from Arlene Love’s collection email info@amiepotsicartadvisory.com.
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