Mary Heilmann

© 2006 Joe Gaffney

Mary Heilmann

Collection of Broido family

Mary Heilmann,"Capistrano" (1994)

Bruce Nauman Richard Serra Willem de Kooning Joseph Mallord William Turner Donald Judd John Waters John Currin Mary Heilmann

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By the time I started painting, I was in the studio, working on my own. I wasn’t having conversations with anybody about what I was doing in painting; I was in the bars, mainly Max’s Kansas City, still trying to have a conversation with the sculptors. Even though I was working in the one practice, I still wanted to be a part of the other.

Do you still have that tendency toward sculpture?

Yes. I’ve used materials like a sculptor all along. At a certain point, when I was teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute, one of my students was a very gifted oil painter — he handled the material in a really funky way — and he taught me about oil painting. So I switched to oil paint, which really lends itself to painterly nuance — a Turner, de Kooning, or John Currin type of nuance. That traditional way of painting did sneak into my work a little bit then, but my style is still really rough and funky in comparison to some of those guys.

Your work clearly has strong ties to geometric abstraction, Minimalism, and Color Field painting, but what sets it apart is the tone, which is often described as “playful.” Was the informality a conscious decision?

It was, right from the beginning. I took a course in Asian art history as an undergraduate at Santa Barbara around the same time that I started making pots. This course taught me about Wabi-sabi, an attitude toward making things in the simplest, most basic way in order to let nature be a part of the creation. That appealed to my personality, because I’m not a careful, fastidious type of craftsman. I also thought that these Wabi-sabi forms were beautiful.

Were you mocking the self-importance of those movements — Minimalism, Color Field painting, etc.?

My work was often read as disrespect, but actually, I was totally enamored by Color Field painting. In school, we took a stand that we didn’t approve of painting — and Color Field painting was what was going on — but I thought it was beautiful. In order to have the conversation, though, it was more productive to say that you hated it and hated painting — you hated any pretty colors, any de Kooning–esque brushstrokes.

Where does your furniture fit in?

Ever since I started out as an art student living in lofts and warehouses, I have always built my own furniture. At the beginning, it was basically benches and tables. When I first came to New York, I made a table piece that was a sculpture, basically just straight post and lintel; it was very simple building. Then, about 15 years ago, I made octagon tables working with another artist, Steve Keister, and we put ceramic tiles on top.

But a table, even an octagon table, is easier than a chair. At one point, I had made some fabric, and I wanted to make a club chair with the fabric as the upholstery. So I made a very simple piece — the basic design probably owes quite a bit to Donald Judd’s chairs —  with a little cushion and a pretty, ruffly slipcover. But it wasn’t comfortable. We put webbing on it to make it comfortable, which worked, and the webbing looked fabulous, so we lost the slipcover.

Are there chairs in the New Museum show?

Yes, we use lots of chairs in my installations now, because they’ve become an important part of my practice of building a social space. When there are chairs in a gallery, people sit in them, and they stay longer.

This New Museum retrospective of your work feels long overdue, especially given the resumes of your male contemporaries. Do you feel you’ve been overlooked by the art establishment because of your gender?

I think the main reason it took people longer to understand what I was up to was my Wabi-sabi attitude. But the gender bias, which was very significant when I first came into art, even in graduate school, was actually a big reason why I did it. It was challenging to try to play with the boys, and, of course, fun.

The titles of many of your paintings suggest the importance of your upbringing in California. Have you ever thought about moving back there?

At a certain point I was planning to move back, in the early ’90s. I had nothing going on in New York: I was teaching part-time, I wasn’t making very much money, and there was no interest in my artwork. I decided to move back to California and get a regular academic teaching job. Then the market and the interest in my work turned around, so I changed my mind.