George Eastman Museum’s current exhibit, “Bea Nettles:
Harvest of Memory,” marks the artist’s first major retrospective in her 50-year
career. The show highlights a lifetime of femme, maternal, and dream-like
works. Throughout her life, Nettles explored a variety of media and themes, and
the Eastman exhibition brings her luscious works and life’s memories together
in a compelling showcase.
Just outside of the galleries
where the exhibit is held, visitors are greeted by an interactive display of Nettles’
“Mountain Dream Tarot” deck — which was produced in 1975 and is unique in that
it’s believed to be the first photo-based deck ever created. Mounted on the
wall is an enlarged image of the Queen of Pentacles, a motherly card that
symbolizes home, hearth, and security, set against a navy wall with pink stars,
mirroring the pattern on Nettles’ dress in the image. Just below that, a
digital display allows guests to explore the deck by receiving a three-card
tarot reading, each card paired with the traditional interpretations associated
with it. The reading sets the stage for the elements of mysticism that can be
found in Nettles’ work.
There is a kind of magic in
Nettles’ ability to elevate often mundane maternal and household themes with her
fanciful use of imagery, collage, color, and diversity of materials. “Harvest
of Memory” is not arranged chronologically. Instead, Nettles’ photographs and
bookworks are arranged thematically to build emotional and thoughtful
narratives.
Throughout the exhibit mauve
and periwinkle walls serve to organize and emphasize smaller narratives built
through collage and Nettles’ reuse of images created with negatives of family
photographs. The hues are borrowed from her hand-colored images; Nettles’ pre-photography
training in painting and background in printmaking are evident in her
application of color. The hues shift across images from dreamy, collaged,
bichromate prints in the section “Flamingo in the Dark” to a whimsical and
moving combination of words and images in many of her bookworks in the exhibit, such
as “The Imaginary Blowtorch.”
There’s an ethereal quality to
her work, emphasized in themes such as the dreams and heavier preoccupations of
her children. In one image, titled “Sacred Stiff” (1983, from “Close to Home”),
Nettles uses collage to build a representation of an insect that plagued her
son’s nightmares. In “Missing” (1986, from “Life Lessons”), faces of lost
children on milk cartons are central to the image, documenting a phenomenon
that haunted her young daughter.
As a working and teaching
artist who became a mother during her career, Nettles incorporated maternal
themes in her work, and the audience sees her evolution both as an artist and
mother in this retrospective. The subjects of the photographs include
arrangements of her children’s toys and her battle with breast cancer, depicted
through poignant self-portraiture.
Instead of letting motherhood
or cancer halt her career, or become a hidden part of herself, Nettles wrapped
her artistic life around these events and used it to explore them.
“You’re interrupted — children,
parents, you know, elderly parents, whatever, illness whatever,” she told CITY
during an interview at Eastman Museum. “And how do you navigate that? And
you’re not a bad person, you know, if you have to stop making art or doing work
or whatever during these interruptions. You just have to do what you can and
learn from it, and pick back up if you can.”
Nettles established a career
in Rochester in the 1970s, at a time when photobooks and printmaking were
flourishing and photography was moving to the forefront as an art form. She was
used to being the only woman in a group exhibition, or one of a few women on an
educational staff — Nettles was one of two women teaching photography at
Rochester Institute of Technology in 1980, out of the 50 photography
instructors.
“I was teaching full time, I
was an artist still exhibiting and I couldn’t leave home, I couldn’t just go on
a trip to China, you know, to photograph something there,” she said. “I had to
do what I had to do, which was stay close to home, use what I had, which was
the kids’ toys, basically and also trying to make Rochester look a little
better in the winter. Some of these are fantasies, you know?”
Nettles’ use of materials and
methods are as practical as they are playful — her choice of medium has often been
determined by what was readily available. Her use of collage and fabric in
early works, including “The Skirted Garden,” was inspired by materials she had
on hand for quiltmaking after she left her warm, native Florida to attend
school at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Later in her career,
when her camera broke on a trip to Colorado, Nettles switched to an Instamatic
instead. When she was invited to work with Polaroid in the 1980s, she took
advantage of the opportunity to not only create large-format images but to
alter them with text in a unique and provocative way.
The memorable exhibition
leaves the viewer with a feeling of knowing Nettles as an intimate friend, an
understanding of her versatility as an artist, and a glimpse into a world that
is often held private though experienced in common by many artists.
Amanda
Chestnut is a freelance writer for CITY. Feedback on this article can be directed
to becca@rochester-citynews.com.
This article appears in Mar 4-10, 2020.
