ABOUT JUDY PFAFF

DEEPWATER A Room-Size Sculpture at Holly Solomon Gallery, SoHo 1980

I will always remember my first encounter with Judy’s work, DEEPWATER installed at the Holly Solomon Gallery on West Broadway/SoHo in 1980. It was a seminal moment for a young artist from Detroit, who still thought that art’s sum total was made up of discreet objects and sculpture and painting were distinctly separate. The Minimalist aesthetic was pervasive in sculpture. Color Field painting and the monolithic image presented a new direction away from Abstract Expressionism; less equaled more, emotions were spared, art became cool, cerebral and distanced from the viewer.

When I saw DEEPWATER, it was obvious to me that Judy Pfaff was working against current trends. I learned that she did not value ideas more than objects and held steadfast to this position as she developed her unique style. She preferred materials that had potential and latent promise while shunning the prevailing notion of “truth to materials.” The questions, What is Sculpture and What is Painting were neither relevant nor interesting.

It was a profound experience for me to walk through DEEPWATER, art that enveloped space and compressed distance, turning perceptions inside out, merging 2D and 3D, blurring the boundary between the art object and observer. The hand and the eye of the artist were ubiquitous throughout the installation and I became a participant in the act of “experiential seeing.” The construction, DEEPWATER could be perceived as a painting, illusionistic and ethereal. But it lived in the present, in real space and time, and it engulfed me.

Coincidentally and quite by chance, Paul Mauren and I met Judy for the first time while gathering to form an artist’s collective in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. We had zeroed in on an 1894 burlap bag factory in a Puerto Rican neighborhood adjacent to Hasidic, Chinese and Italian communities. The year was 1984 and Williamsburg was very edgy and boisterous with old world charm. The entire Manhattan skyline could be seen from our fifth-story rooftop, but the distance between seemed worlds apart.

In our neighborhood of rundown row houses, derelict lots and trashy streets, Judy reached out to scruffy, tough kids and invited them into the studio where she fed them and gave them toys. She put neighbors to work who could not speak English. In our side yard, once filled with two-story high detritus, she built a rock garden and planted a profusion of morning glories that blanketed the building. Yet, with all of the enormous distractions of city life and survival, she was relentless in her drive to produce art for a multitude of exhibitions and opportunities that always came her way